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THE    EXPOSITORS    BIBLE 


EDITED  BV  THE   REV. 


.W.     ROBERTSON    NICOLL,    M.A.,    LL.D. 

Editor  of  "  The  Expositor" 


THE    BOOK    OF    DEUTERONOMY 


ANDREW     HARPER,     B.D 


NEW  YORK 

A.    C    ARMSTRONG    AND    SON 
51    EAST    TENTH    STREET 

1895 


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THE 

BOOK    OF    DEUTERONOMY 


BY    THE    REV. 

ANDREW  '^HARPER,    B.D. 

PROFESSOR  OF  HEBREW  AND  OLD  TESTAMENT   EXEGESIS,   ORMOND  COLLEGE 
WITHIN   THE    UNIVERSITY,    MELBOURNE 


NEW  YORK 

A.    C.    ARMSTRONG    AND    SON 

51    EAST    TENTH    STREET 

1895 


2)cOtcatcC)  to 
REV.    A.    B.    DAVIDSON,    D.D.,    LL.D. 

NEW   COLLEGE,    EDINBURGH 

IN   VERY  GRATEFUL  REMEMBRANCE 

OF 

INSTRUCTION   AND   IMPULSE 

IN     OLD     TESTAMENT     STUDIES 


PREFACE. 

AN  adequate  exposition  of  Deuteronomy  requires  the 
discussion  of  many  topics.  The  author  has  en- 
deavoured to  keep  these  various  claims  in  view  :  at  the 
same  time  the  hmits  of  the  volume  have  dictated  selection 
and  compression.  In  particular,  a  chapter  on  miracle  in 
the  Old  Testament  has  been  wholly  omitted.  That  topic 
cannot  be  said  to  have  a  peculiar  or  exclusive  relation 
to  Deuteronomy.  Yet  the  writer  would  have  wished  to 
include  in  the  volume  a  reasoned  statement  of  the 
grounds  on  which  he  owns  and  asserts  the  supernatural 
in  Old  Testament  history ;  all  the  more  because  he 
admits  critical  views  which  have  sometimes  been  asso- 
ciated, and  still  oftener  supposed  to  be  associated,  with 
rationahstic  views  generally.  For  the  present  this  dis- 
cussion is  postponed.  In  some  instances,  also,  the  writer 
has  been  obliged  to  content  himself  with  statements 
on  critical  questions  more  brief  than  he  could  have 
desired ;  but  it  is  hoped  that  enough  has  been  said 
to  explain  the  position  assumed,  and  to  make  clear  the 
main  lines  of  argument. 

The  task  of  adjusting  the  matter  to  the  space  would 
have  been  easier  if  it  had  seemed  legitimate  to  omit  the 
critical  and  archaeological  questions  on  the  one  hand,  or, 

vii 


VIU 


PREFACE 


on  the  other,  to  leave  untouched  the  bearing  of  the 
thoughts  and  Laws  of  Deuteronomy  on  the  religious 
history  of  the  race,  and  on  the  dangers  and  duties  of 
our  own  age.  But  an  exposition  of  Deuteronomy  must 
endeavour  to  open  the  appropriate  outlooks  in  all  these 
directions. 

Owing  to  the  author's  distance  from  London  the  work 
of  passing  the  book  through  the  press  has  necessarily 
been  left  wholly  to  others.  It  is  hoped  that  oversights 
which  may  have  arisen  from  this  cause  will  be  pardoned. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER   I 

PAGE 

THE   AUTHORSHIP    AND    AGE    OF    DEUTERONOMY  .  .  I 


CHAPTER   II 
THE    HISTORIC    SETTING    OF    DEUTERONOMY  .  .  -37 

CHAPTER    III 

THE   DIVINE    GOVERNMENT 4^ 

Deut.  i.-iii. 


CHAPTER    IV 


THE   DECALOGUE — ITS    FORM      . 
Deut.  v.  1-2  i 


60 


CHAPTER  V 
THE    DECALOGUE — ITS    SUBSTANCE     ....  73 

CHAPTER  VI 

THE   MEDIATORSHIP    OF    MOSES  .  .  .  .    I06 

Deut,  v.  22-33 

ix 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  VII 

PAGE 

LOVE    TO    GOD    THE    LAW    OF    LIFE       .  .  ,  -  .    I  l6 

Dbut.  vi.  4,  5 


CHAPTER   VIII 

EDUCATION — MOSAIC    VIEW 1 46 

Deut.  vi.  6-25 

CHAPTER   IX 

THE    BAN  168 

Deut.  vii. 

CHAPTER   X 
THE    BAN    IN    MODERN    LIFE 1 84 

CHAPTER   XI 

THE    BREAD    OF    THE    SOUL  ......    202 

Deut.  viii. 

CHAPTER  XII 

ISRAEL'S    ELECTION,    AND    MOTIVES    FOR    FAITHFULNESS        .    2l8 
Deut.  ix.-xi. 

CHAPTER   XIII 

LAW    AND    RELIGION  .......    239 

Deut.  xii.-xxvi. 

CHAPTER  XIV 

LAWS    OF    SACRIFICE 253 

Peut.  xii. 


CONTENTS  xi 


CHAPTER   XV 

PAGE 

THE      RELATION      OF      OLD      TESTAMENT       SACRIFICE      TO 

CHRISTIANITY     ........    267 

CHAPTER  XVI 

LAWS    AGAINST    IDOLATROUS    ACTS    AND    CUSTOMS  .  -277 

Deut.  xiii.,  xiv. 

CHAPTER    XVII 

THE   SPEAKERS    FOR    GOD — I.    THE    KING     ....    295 
Deut.  xvii.  14-20 

CHAPTER   XVIII 

SPEAKERS    FOR    GOD — II.    THE    PRIEST  ....    308 

Deut.  xviii.  1-8 

CHAPTER  XIX 

SPEAKERS    FOR    GOD — III.    THE    PROPHET     ....    334 
Deut.  xviii.  9-22 

CHAPTER   XX 
THE   ECONOMIC   ASPECTS   OF    ISRAELITE    LIFE      .  .  -355 

CHAPTER   XXI 
JUSTICE    IN    ISRAEL 377 

CHAPTER   XXII 
LAWS    OF    PURITY    (chastity    AND    MARRIAGE)    .  .  .    396 


xii  CONTENTS 


CHAPTER   XXIII 

PAGE 

LAWS   OF   KINDNESS 41I 


CHAPTER   XXIV 

MOSES'    FAREWELL    SPEECHES      ....  .    433 

Deut.  iv.    1-40,   xxvii.-xxx. 


CHAPTER   XXV 

THE    SONG    AND    BLESSING    OF    MOSES  .  .  -452 

Deut,  xxxii.,  xxxiii. 

CHAPTER  XXVI 
MOSES'    CHARACTER    AND    DEATH  .  .  .  .  -471 


CHAPTER  I 
THE  AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

IN  approaching  a  book  so  spiritually  great  as  Deuter- 
onomy, it  might  seem  superfluous  to  allude  to  the 
critical  questions  which  have  been  raised  concerning  it. 
On  any  supposition  as  to  origin  and  authorship,  its 
spiritual  elevation  and  the  moral  impulse  it  gives  are 
always  there ;  and  it  might  consequently  seem  sufficient 
to  expound  and  illustrate  the  text  as  we  have  it.  Minute 
and  vexatious  inquiry  into  details,  such  as  any  adequate 
treatment  of  the  critical  question  demands,  tends  to  draw 
away  the  mind,  in  a  disastrous  way,  from  the  spiritual 
and  moral  purpose  of  the  book.  That  however  is  pre- 
cisely what  the  expositor  has  to  elucidate  and  apply ;  and 
so  it  might  seem  to  be  an  error  in  method  to  enter  upon 
extraneous  matters  such  as  those  with  which  criticism 
has  mainly  to  do. 

On  the  other  hand,  this  has  to  be  taken  into  account. 
The  truth  about  the  composition  of  a  book,  about  the 
authorities  it  is  founded  on,  about  the  times  in  which  and 
the  circumstances  under  which  it  was  composed,  if  it 
be  attainable,  often  throws  a  very  welcome  light  upon  the 
meaning.  It  clears  up  obscurities,  removes  chances  of 
error,  and  often,  when  two  or  three  possible  paths  have 
opened  before  us,  it  shuts  us  up  to  the  right  one.  But  if 
that  is  the  case  when  no  special  conflict  of  opinion  has 
arisen,  it  is  much  more  so  when  a  revolution  of  opinion 
concerning  the  whole  religious  life  of  a  nation  has  been 

I 


THE   BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


caused  by  the  critical  view  of  a  book  adopted  by  able  men. 
Now  that  is  plainly  the  case  here.  Deuteronomy  has  been 
the  key  of  the  position,  the  centre  of  the  conflict,  in  the 
battle  which  has  been  waged  so  hotly  as  to  the  growth  of 
religion  in  Israel.  The  attack  upon  the  views  hitherto  gene- 
rally held  within  the  Church  in  regard  to  that  matter  has 
rested  more  upon  the  character  and  date  of  Deuteronomy 
than  upon  anything  else.  Consequently  every  part  of 
the  book  has  been  the  object  of  intense  and  microscopic 
scrutiny,  and  there  is  scarcely  a  cardinal  point  in  it  which 
must  not  be  regarded  differently,  according  as  we  accept  or 
reject  the  strictly  Mosaic  origin  of  the  book  as  a  whole,  or 
even  of  the  legal  portions.  The  difference  is  probably 
never  absolutely  fundamental.  On  either  supposition,  as 
we  have  said,  the  spiritual  and  moral  teaching  remains  the 
same ;  but  the  mind  is  apt  to  be  clouded  with  harassing 
doubt  as  to  many  important  points,  until  clear  views  on 
the  critical  question  have  been  attained.  This  is  felt  more 
or  less  acutely  by  all  readers  of  the  Old  Testament  who 
are  touched  by  recent  debates,  and  they  expect  that  any 
new  exposition  shall  help  them  to  a  clearer  view.  Many 
will  even  demand  that  some  effort  in  that  direction  should 
be  made  ;  and,  as  we  think,  they  rightly  demand  it. 

But  there  is  still  another  reason  for  dealing  with  the 
questions  gathering  round  the  authorship  and  age  of  our 
book,  and  it  is  decisive.  The  debate  concerning  the  criti- 
cal views  of  the  Old  Testament  has  reached  a  stage  at 
which  it  is  no  longer  confined  to  the  professed  teachers 
.and  students  of  the  Old  Testament.  It  has  filtered  down, 
through  magazines  first,  and  then  through  newspapers, 
into  the  public  mind,  and  opinions  are  becoming  current 
concerning  the  results  of  criticism  w-hich  are  so  partial 
and  ill-informed  that  they  cannot  but  produce  evil  results 
of  a  formidable  kind  in  the  near  future.  By  those  who 
are   sceptically  incHned,  as  well  as  by  those  who  chng 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY  3 

most  closely  to  the  teaching  of  the  Churches,  it  is  loudly 
proclaimed  that  the  acceptance  of  the  critical  view — viz.  that 
the  Levitical  law,  as  a  written  code,  came  into  existence 
after  the  Exile,  and  that  Deuteronomy,  written  in  the  royal 
period  of  Israelite  history,  occupies  a  middle  position 
between  the  first  legislation  (Exod.  xx. — xxiii.)  and  this 
latest — destroys  the  character  of  the  Old  Testament  as  a 
record  of  Revelation,  and  undermines  Christianity  itself. 
The  former  class  rejoice  that  this  should  be  so,  and  think 
their  scepticism  is  thereby  justified.  The  latter,  on  the 
contrary,  reject  the  critical  conclusions  with  vehemence. 
They  have  found  God  through  the  Scripture,  and,  resting 
upon  this  experience,  they  turn  away  from  theories  which 
they  believe  to  be  in  direct  conflict  with  it.  To  write  an 
exposition  of  Deuteronomy  therefore,  without  correcting 
the  false  impression  that  the  critical  view  as  to  its  age, 
etc.,  is  incompatible  with  faith  in  a  Divine  revelation, 
would  be  to  miss  one  of  the  great  opportunities  which  fall 
to  writers  on  the  Old  Testament  in  our  day.  Questions 
regarding  the  age,  authorship,  and  literary  form  of  the 
books  of  Scripture  cannot  ultimately  be  so  decided  as  to 
nullify  the  testimony  borne  to  them  by  the  experience 
of  so  many  generations  of  Christian  men  and  women. 
Whatever  makes  itself  ultimately  credible  to  the  human 
mind  in  regard  to  such  matters,  will  always  be  capable 
of  being  held  along  with  a  belief  in  the  manifestation  of 
Himself  which  God  has  given  in  the  history  and  literature 
of  Israel.  But  nothing  will  make  that  fact  so  readily 
apprehensible,  nothing  will  make  it  stand  out  so  clearly, 
as  an  exposition  of  a  book  like  Deuteronomy,  which  takes 
account  of  all  that  seems  established  in  the  critical  view. 
Even  the  most  extreme  critical  positions,  when  separated 
from  the  totally  irrelevant  assumption  (which  too  often 
accompanies  them)  that  miracle  is  unhistorical,  are  com- 
patible with  a  real  faith  in  Revelation  and  Inspiration.     It 


THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


is  not  the  fact  of  Revelation,  but  the  common  conception 
of  its  method,  which  is  challenged  by  the  critical  theories. 
We  shall  therefore  only  try  to  meet  a  clamant  need  of 
our  time,  if  we  take  with  us  into  the  explanation  of  the 
Deuteronomic  teaching  a  definite  conclusion  as  to  the 
authorship,  age,  and  literary  character  of  the  book. 

As  regards  authorship,  the  ordinary  opinion  still  is  that 
Deuteronomy  was  written  by  Moses.  This  was  the  view 
handed  over  to  Christianity  in  pre-critical  ages  by  the 
Jews,  and  accepted  as  the  natural  one.  But  if  the  Mosaic 
authorship  of  the  whole  contents  of  the  other  books  of 
the  Pentateuch  is  now  given  up,  much  more  should  it  be 
given  up  in  the  case  of  Deuteronomy.  For  Deuteronomy 
does  not  even  claim  to  be  written  by  Moses.  It  is  not 
merely  that  in  it  Moses  is  often  spoken  of  in  the  third 
person ;  that,  if  it  were  carried  out  consistently,  as  it  is, 
for  instance,  in  Caesar's  Commentaries,  would  be  com- 
patible with  Mosaic  authorship.  But  what  we  find  is 
that  the  author,  ''  whenever  he  speaks  himself,  purports  to 
give  a  description  in  the  third  person  of  what  Moses  did 
or  said,"  ^  while  Moses,  when  he  speaks,  always  uses  the 
first  person.  The  book,  consequently,  falls  naturally  into 
two  portions  :  the  subsidiary,  introductory  framework  of 
statement,  in  which  Moses  is  always  spoken  of  in  the 
third  person,  together  with  the  historical  portions ;  and  the 
utterances  of  Moses  himself,  which  these  introduce  and 
hold  together,  and  in  which  Moses  always  uses  the  first 
person.^  Again,  wherever  the  expression  "  beyond  Jordan  " 
is  used  in  the  portions  where  the  author  speaks  for 
himself,  it  signifies  the  land  of  Moab.^  Wherever,  on  the 
contrary,  Moses  is  introduced  speaking  in  the  first  person, 

'  Driver,  Introduction,  Sth  Ed.,  p.  84. 

2  Cf.  Deut.  i.   I-S,  iv.  41-43,  iv.  44,  v.   i,  xxvii.  i,  9-11,  xxix.  I,  xxxi. 
1-30. 


3  Cf.  Deut.  i.  I,  5,  iv.  41,  46,  47,  49. 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY  5 

"  beyond  Jordan  "  denotes  the  land  of  Israel/  The  only 
exception  is  iii.  8,  where  at  the  beginning  of  a  long 
archaeological  note,  which  cannot  have  originally  formed 
part  of  the  speech  of  Moses,  and  consequently  must  be 
a  comment  of  the  writer,  or  of  a  later  editor  of  Deuter- 
onomy, "  beyond  Jordan  "  signifies  the  land  of  Moab.  If, 
consequently,  the  book  be  taken  at  its  word,  there  can  be 
no  doubt  that  it  professes  to  be  an  account  of  what  Moses 
did  and  said  on  a  certain  day  in  the  land  of  Moab,  before 
his  death,  written  by  another  person,  who  lived  to  the 
west  of  the  Jordan.  The  author  must  consequently  have 
lived  after  Moses'  day ;  and  he  has  taken  pains  by  his  use 
of  language  to  distinguish  himself  from  Moses  in  a  most 
unmistakable  way.  It  is  no  doubt  possible,  though  not 
probable,  that  Moses  might  have  written  of  himself  in  the 
third  person  in  the  connecting  passages,  and  in  the  first 
person  in  the  remainder  of  his  book  :  but  that  he  should 
have  made  the  anxious  distinction  we  have  seen  as  to  the 
phrase  ''  beyond  Jordan  "  does  not  seem  possible. 

But  if  our  book,  as  we  have  it,  is  not  by  Moses,  but  is 
an  account  by  another  person  of  what  Moses  did  and  said 
on  a  certain  occasion,  that  fact  has  a  very  important  bearing 
upon  the  speeches  reported  as  Mosaic.  For  the  style  of 
the  whole  book  up  to  the  end  of  the  twenty-eighth  chapter 
is,  for  all  practical  purposes,  one.  The  parts  where  the 
author  speaks,  and  the  parts  where  Moses  speaks,  are  all 
alike  in  style,  and  that  style  is  in  all  respects  different 
from  the  style  of  the  speeches  attributed  to  Moses  in 
other  parts  of  the  Pentateuch.  Consequently  we  cannot 
accept  the  speeches  and  laws  as  being  in  the  very  words 
of  Moses.  They  may  contain  the  exact  ideas  of  Moses, 
but  these  have  manifestly  passed  through  the  mind  and 
clothed  themselves  in   the  vocabulary  of  the   author   of 

'  iii.  20,  25,  and  xi.  30. 


THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


Deuteronomy.  Even  Delitzsch  is  quite  decisive  on  this 
point.-^  In  the  tenth  of  his  Pentateuch  Krittsche  Studieriy 
after  distinguishing  the  Deuteronomist  from  Moses,  he 
continues  thus :  "  The  addresses  are  freely  reproduced, 
and  he  who  reproduces  them  is  the  same  who  also 
contributed  the  historical  framework  and  the  historical 
details  between  the  addresses.  The  same  colouring,  though 
in  a  less  degree,  may  also  be  remarked  in  the  repetition 
of  the  law  in  chapters  xii. — xxvi.  to  which  the  book  owes 
its  name.  All  the  component  parts  of  Deuteronomy,  not 
excepting  the  legal  prescriptions,  are  woven  through  and 
through  with  the  favourite  phrases  of  the  Deuteronomist," 

Under  these  circumstances,  the  question  immediately 
suggests  itself  to  what  degree  this  representation  of 
Moses'  legislation  can  be  regarded  as  purely  and  un- 
mixedly  Mosaic.  Was  this  legislation  given  in  the  main 
or  entirely  by  Moses,  and,  if  it  was  so  given,  may  there 
not  be  mingled  with  what  he  gave  inferences  drawn  by 
the  author  in  whose  style  the  book  is  written,  and  adapta- 
tions demanded  by  the  exigencies  of  his  later  times  ?  A 
full  discussion  of  this  point  would,  of  course,  be  out  of 
the  question  here,  and  it  would,  moreover,  be  superfluous. 
In  Dr.  Driver's  article  on  '*  Deuteronomy "  in  Smith's 
Dictionary  of  the  Bibky  and  in  his  Introduction  to  Hebreiv 
Literature^  detailed  discussions  will  be  found.  All  that 
is  necessary  here  is  that  one  or  two  large  and  salient 
aspects  of  the  question  should  be  looked  at. 

In  the  first  place,  it  is  important  to  know  whether  the 
author  of  Deuteronomy  can  have  been  a  contemporary  of 
Moses,  or  a  younger  contemporary  of  his  contemporaries. 
If  he  were,  the  relation  between  the  speeches  and  legis- 
lation in  his  book  and  that  which  Moses  actually  uttered 
would  be  similar  to  that  between  the  speeches  of  Christ 

'  Cf.  Pentateuch  Kritische  Studien  in  Luthardt's  Zeitschrift,  1880. 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY  7 

reported  by  St.  John  in  his  Gospel  and  the  actual  words 
of  our  Lord.  They  might,  in  fact,  be  taken  to  be  in  all 
respects  a  reliable,  though  not  a  verbal,  representation 
of  what  Moses  actually  said  or  commanded.  If,  on  the 
contrary,  it  should  be  proved,  either  from  the  character 
of  the  legislation  itself,  or  from  the  evidence  we  have  as 
to  the  date  of  the  authorities  whom  the  Deuteronomist 
quotes,  and  upon  whom  he  relies,  that  he  must  have  lived 
centuries  later,  then  any  such  confidence  would  be 
materially  weakened.  Now  there  can  be  no  doubt,  to 
take  the  last  point  first,  that  Deuteronomy,  taken  as  a 
legal  code,  though  not  wanting  in  laws  which  have  been 
first  formulated  by  its  author,  is  mainly  intended  to  be  a 
repetition  and  a  reinforcement  of  what  we  find  in  the 
Book  of  the  Covenant  (Exod.  xx. — xxiii.).  The  result  of 
Driver's  careful  tabulation  of  the  subjects  dealt  with  in  the 
two  codes  is  "that  the  laws  in  JE,^  viz.  Exod.  xx. — xxiii. 
(repeated  partially  in  xxxiv.  1026)  and  the  kindred  section 
xiii.  3-16, /or/;/  the  foundations  of  the  Deuteronomic  legis- 
lation. This  is  evident  as  well  from  the  numerous  verbal 
coincidences  as  from  the  fact  that  nearly  the  whole  ground 
covered  by  Exod.  xx. — xxiii.  is  included  in  it ;  almost  the 
only  exception  being  the  special  compensations  to  be  paid 
for  various  injuries  (Exod.  xxi.  18,  xxii.  15),  which 
would  be  less  necessary  in  a  manual  intended  for  the 
people."     This  is  also   the  conclusion  of  other  scholars, 

'  It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  remind  readers  that,  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  critics,  J  signifies  one  of  the  constituent  documents  of  the  Penta- 
teuch which  uses  the  name  Yahweh  for  God.  Its  date  is  about  850  b.c. 
E  is  that  document  which  uses  the  name  Elohim,  and  may  be  dated  about 
the  same  period  as  J.  D  is  the  author  of  Deuteronomy,  who  wrote, 
it  is  supposed,  in  the  reign  of  Manasseh,  perhaps  about  670  B.C.  P  is 
the  Priestly  document,  which  Dillmann  dates  before  Deuteronomy,  but 
which  most  critics  think  was  brought  substantially  into  its  present  shape 
by  Ezra.  The  portions  of  the  Pentateuch  assigned  to  these  various 
documents  will  be  found  in  Driver's  Introdttction. 


THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


and  indeed  is  plainly  demanded  by  the  facts.  It  is,  more- 
over, what  may  be  called  the  Biblical  hypothesis,  for 
Moses  is  supposed  to  have  been  renewing  the  covenant 
made  at  Horeb,  and  repeating  its  conditions. 

But  in  the  present  condition  of  our  knowledge,  the  fact 
of  Deuteronomy's  dependence  upon  the  Book  of  the 
Covenant  brings  into  view  unexpected  consequences. 
It  is  true,  certainly,  that  the  laws  of  the  latter  code  existed 
before  they  were  incorporated  in  the  text  where  we  now 
find  them.  Consequently  no  verbal  coincidences  would 
give  us  the  assurance  that  the  Deuteronomist  had  before 
him  the  actual  book  in  which  these  laws  have  come  down 
to  us.  But  a  conclusion  may  be  reached  in  another  way. 
A  comparison  of  the  historical  portions  of  Deuteronomy 
with  the  corresponding  narrative  in  the  previous  four  books 
of  our  Bible  shows  that  for  his  history  also  the  author 
of  Deuteronomy  relies  upon  these  earlier  narratives,  and 
that  he  must  have  had  portions  at  least  of  them  before 
him  in  the  same  text  as  we  have  now.  The  verbal 
coincidences  tabulated  in  Driver,  pp.  75  f.,  as  well  as  the 
general  and  exact  agreement  in  the  events  recorded  in 
Deuteronomy  with  those  recorded  in  the  earlier  books, 
show  that  the  author  has  not  only  drawn  his  information 
from  the  same  sources  as  those  of  the  earlier  books,  but 
that  he  must  have  had  before  him  at  least  that  section 
which  contains  the  laws. 

Now,  as  it  happens,  in  the  course  of  the  analysis  of  the 
Pentateuch  it  has  come  to  be  all  but  universally  acknow- 
ledged that  Exod.  xx. — xxiii.  form  part  of  a  document 
which  can  be  traced,  dovetailed  into  others,  from  Genesis  to 
Joshua,  and  perhaps  beyond  it.  This  document  has  been 
called  by  Wellhausen  the  Jehovist  document,  and  in  all 
critical  books  it  is  referred  to  as  JE,  as  being  made  up  of 
two  sections,  one  of  which  uses  Yahweh  for  the  Divine 
name,  and  the  other  Elohim.     The  only  generally  known 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY  9 

scholar  who  denies  the  existence  of  JE  is  Professor  Green, 
of  Princeton  in  America,  who,  rightly  enough,  sees  that 
the  Mosaic  authorship  of  the  Pentateuch  cannot  be  held, 
if  these  separate  component  documents  are  acknowledged. 
But  the  separate  existence  and  character  of  JE  may  be 
regarded  as  demonstrated,  and  also  that  it  has  been 
interwoven  with  another  narrative,  largely  parallel,  but 
which  deals  of  preference  with  priestly  matters,  and  has 
consequently  been  called  the  Priest  codex,  or  P.  To- 
gether these  make  up  the  first  four  books  of  the  Penta- 
teuch ;  and  the  remarkable  thing  is  that,  both  as  regards 
law  and  history,  Deuteronomy  is  dependent  upon  JE. 
''Throughout  the  parallels  just  tabulated,"  says  Driver,^ 
''  (as  well  as  in  the  others  occurring  in  the  book),  not  the 
allusions  only,  but  the  words  cited,  will  be  found,  all  but 
uniformly,  to  be  in  JE,  not  in  P.  An  important  conclusion 
follows  from  this  fact.  Inasmuch  as,  in  our  existing 
Pentateuch,  JE  and  P  repeatedly  cross  one  another,  the 
constant  absence  of  any  reference  to  P  can  only  be 
reasonably  explained  by  one  supposition,  viz.  that  when 
Deuteronomy  was  composed  JE  and  P  were  not  yet  united 
into  a  single  work,  and  JE  alone  formed  the  basis  of 
Deuteronomy."  And  this  is  not  Driver's  conclusion  only. 
Dillmann,  who  argues  with  splendid  ability  against  Well- 
hausen  for  the  dating  of  P  in  the  ninth  century  B.C.  instead 
of  after  the  Exile,  and  consequently  considers  that  it  was 
in  existence  before  Deuterononi}^,  still  holds  that  in  general 
JE  is  the  Deuteronomist's  authority  both  for  law  and 
history,  contenting  himself  with  affirming  that  D  shows 
undoubted  acquaintance  with  laws,  etc.,  known  to  us  only 
in  P.  Clearly,  therefore,  Deuteronomy  must  have  been 
written  after  JE  had  been  made  public,  or  at  least  after 
J  and  E  had  been  written. 

*  Driver,  Introduction,  p.  76. 


10  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

The  question  therefore  arises,  what  is  their  date  ?  An 
answer  can  be  gradually  approached  in  this  way.  As  JE 
reappear  as  an  element  in  the  Book  of  Joshua/  and 
contribute  to  it  an  account  of  Joshua's  death  and  burial, 
they  cannot  have  been  written  by  him,  nor  before  his  death. 
That  is  the  first  fixed  point.  Then  we  may  proceed  a 
step  further.  In  various  parts  of  JE  there  occur  phrases 
which  cannot  all  be  later  glosses,  and  which  imply 
that  the  land,  when  the  writer  lived,  had  long  ceased  to 
be  in  possession  of  the  Canaanites,  if  some  of  them  do 
not  even  presuppose  a  time  when  the  original  inhabitants 
had  been  absorbed  into  Israel,  as  Solomon  attempted  to 
absorb  them  by  making  them  slaves  of  the  State.  Such 
passages  are  Gen.  xii.  6,  ''  And  the  Canaanite  was  then  in 
the  land  "  ;  Gen.  xiii.  7,  '*  Moreover  the  Canaanites  and  the 
Perizzites  dwelled  then  in  the  land";  Gen.  xl.  15,  in 
which  Joseph  says  of  himself,  *'  I  was  stolen  away  out 
of  the  land  of  the  Hebrews,"  a  name  which  the  country 
could  not  have  acquired  till  some  little  time  at  least  after 
the  conquest.  Further,  in  Numbers  xxxii.  41,  which 
belongs  to  J  or  E,  probably  the  latter,  we  have  an  account 
of  the  rise  of  the  name  Hawwoth  Jair.  Now  in  Judges 
X-  3"5  we  are  informed  that  the  Jair  from  whom  the 
Hawwoth  Jair  had  their  name  was  a  judge  in  Israel  after 
the  time  of  Abimelech,  w^ho  made  new  conquests  for  his 
tribe  east  of  the  Jordan.  Unless,  therefore,  the  unlikely 
hypothesis  be  accepted  that  both  the  district  bearing  this 
name  in  Judges  and  its  conqueror  are  other  than  those 
mentioned  in  Numbers,  the  verse  brings  down  JE  at  least 
to  the  period  of  Abimelech,  which  Kautzsch  in  his  View  of 
the  History  of  the  Israelites^  appended  to  his  translation 
of  the  Old  Testament,  states  as  about  11 20  B.C.,  i.e,  two 
hundred  years  after  the  Exodus. 

'  Josh,  xxiv.  30. 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE  OF  DEUTERONOMY  ii 

The  next  step  is  suggested  by  Gen.  xxxvi.  31-39,  a 
passage  from  JE  in  which  a  list  of  Edomite  kings  is  given 
with  this  heading  :  "  These  are  the  kings  that  reigned  in 
the  land  of  Edom  before  there  reigned  any  king  over  the 
children  of  Israel."  That  sentence  clearly  cannot  have 
been  written  before  kings  arose  in  Israel ;  consequently  JE 
must  be  later  than  the  days  of  Saul,  and  probably  than 
David,  since  the  Israelite  kingship  appears  to  the  author's 
mind  here  as  a  firmly  established  institution.  The  author 
of  Deuteronomy  must  have  lived  and  written  at  a  still 
later  date,  and  we  are  thus  gradually  brought  down  to 
the  time  of  Solomon,  or  perhaps  even  later. 

And  the  literary  indications  of  date  confirm  this  con- 
clusion. For  instance,  two  books  are  quoted  occasionally 
in  JE  as  authorities,  which  must  consequently  have 
existed  before  that  work — the  Book  of  the  Wars  of  Yahweh 
(Numb.  xxi.  14,  15),  and  the  Book  of  Yashar  (Josh.  x.  12  f)- 
The  former  has  indeed  been  declared  by  Geiger  to  be  the 
product  of  false  punctuation ;  but  soberer  critics  have 
accepted  it  and  date  it  in  Solomon's  day.  However  that 
may  be,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  latter  actually 
existed,  and  was  probably  a  collection  of  songs,  since  from 
it  the  verses  describing  the  standing  still  of  the  sun  and 
moon  are  quoted.  But  we  learn  from  2  Sam.  i.  18  that 
David's  beautiful  lament  for  Saul  and  Jonathan  was 
contained  in  this  book,  and  was  quoted  from  it  by  the 
sacred  historian.  The  book  must  therefore  have  been 
compiled,  or  at  least  completed,  after  David's  lament.  As 
it  was  manifestly  a  compilation,  and  the  poems  it  contained 
may  have  been  of  very  various  ages,  much  stress  in  our 
search  for  dates  cannot  be  laid  upon  it.  It  is  still  of 
some  weight,  however,  that  this  post-Davidic  book  is 
quoted  by  JE ;  so  far  as  it  goes,  that  fact  confirms  the 
conclusion  arrived  at  from  other  indications. 

In  the  same  way,  the  linguistic  indications,  though  not 


12  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

of  themselves  conclusive,  point  towards  the  same  period. 
It  is,  of  course,  true  that  we  are  as  yet  far  from  having 
a  general  agreement  as  to  the  history  of  the  Hebrew 
language.  That  can  only  be  established  along  with  the 
history  of  the  Hebrew  literature  and  the  Hebrew  people  ; 
and  perhaps  we  never  shall  be  able  to  fix  any  definite 
stages  in  the  growth  and  decay  of  the  language.  Never- 
theless no  careful  reader  of  JE  will  deny  what  Professor 
Driver  says  regarding  them :  ''  Both  belong  to  the  golden 
period  of  Hebrew  literature.  They  resemble  the  best 
parts  of  Judges  and  Samuel  (much  of  which  cannot  be 
greatly  later  than  David's  own  time)  ;  but  whether  they 
are  actually  earlier  or  later  than  these,  the  language  and 
style  do  not  enable  us  to  say.  There  is  at  least  no 
archaic  flavour  perceptible  in  the  style  of  JE."  ^  That 
is  an  admirably  balanced  judgment,  and  we  may  rely 
upon  the  indication  it  gives  as  an  additional  confirma- 
tion of  what  we  have  already  seen  to  be  probable. 

It  is  impossible  that  these  various  lines  of  inquiry 
should  converge,  as  they  have  done,  towards  the  early 
centuries  of  the  kingship  as  the  date  of  JE,  if  Moses  had 
written  Deuteronomy,  in  which  JE  is  drawn  upon  at  every 
moment.  We  may  consequently  dismiss  that  view  finally, 
and  admit  that  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  cannot  well  have 
written  before  the  middle  of  the  kingly  period.  But  we  have 
still  to  inquire  what  the  character  of  the  Mosaic  speeches 
and  the  Mosaic  writings  given  in  Deuteronomy  is  in  that 
case.  Had  the  author  lived  and  written  near  the  time 
of  Moses,  we  might,  as  has  been  said,  have  accepted  them 
as  the  Church  generally  accepts  the  Johannine  speeches 
of  Christ.  But  if  the  Deuteronomist  wrote  four,  or 
five,  or  six  centuries  after  Moses,  what  are  we  to  say  ? 
In  one  view  it  must  be  granted  that  his  account  may 
be  as  accurate  as  if  it  had  been  written  within  fifty  years 

'  Introduction,  p.  117. 


AUTHORSHIP  AND   AGE  OF  DEUTERONOMY  13 

of  Moses'  death.  For  an  author  of  our  own  day,  by 
keeping  close  to  original  written  authorities,  and  strenuously 
endeavouring  to  keep  out  of  his  mind  any  information  he 
may  have  as  to  later  times,  may  reproduce  with  marvellous 
correctness  the  actual  state  of  things,  as  regards  law  and 
other  departments  of  public  life,  which  existed  in  England, 
say,  five  hundred  years  ago.  Similarly  the  author  of 
Deuteronomy  may  have  handed  on  to  us,  without  flaw  or 
defect,  the  information  as  to  Moses'  sayings  and  doings  in 
the  plains  of  Moab  which  he  had  received  from  the  written 
accounts  of  Moses'  contemporaries.  He  may  have  done  so  ; 
but  when  we  consider  that  his  authorities  may  have  been  in 
part  not  much  earlier  than  his  own  time,  that  the  critical 
sifting  of  history  was  then  unknown,  and  finally  and 
most  important  of  all,  that  the  Deuteronomist  has  horta- 
tory much  more  than  purely  historical  aims,  we  cannot 
evade  the  question  whether  a  good  deal  that  is  here  set 
down  to  Moses  may  not  turn  out  to  be  additions  to  and 
deductions  from  the  original  Mosaic  germs  of  law,  made 
by  inspired  law-givers  and  prophets  who  took  up  and 
carried  on  Moses'  work.  Many  assert  that  this  is  so,  and 
we  must  face  and  try  to  settle  the  question  they  raise. 

The  theory  held  by  those  who  most  strenuously  deny 
this  assertion  is  that  all  the  laws  in  the  Pentateuch  are 
Mosaic  in  the  strict  sense,  that  the  codes  were  given  by 
Moses  in  the  order  in  which  they  now  stand  in  the 
Pentateuch,  and  that  they  were  enacted  with  all  their 
modifications  in  a  period  of  not  more  than  forty  years,  all 
of  which  was  spent  in  the  desert.  In  order  to  ascertain 
whether  this  view  is  tenable,  we  shall  take  one  or  two  of 
the  more  important  matters,  such  as  the  place  of  worship, 
the  agents  of  worship,  and  the  support  of  the  cultus ; 
and  we  shall  compare  the  provisions  of  the  various  codes  in 
order  to  see  whether  they  can  be  supposed  to  belong  to 
so  short  a  period,  or  to  have  been  all  enacted  by  one  man. 


14  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Let  US  take  first  the  place  of  worship.  The  three  codes 
— that  called  the  Book  of  the  Covenant  (Exod.  xx. — xxiii.), 
that  contained  in  Leviticus  and  Numbers  and  called  the 
Levitical  code,  and  that  in  Deuteronomy — all  contain 
directions  about  this.  In  the  first  the  prescriptions  are 
(Exod.  XX.  24)  :  "  An  altar  of  earth  shalt  thou  make  to  Me, 
and  thou  shalt  sacrifice  upon  it  thy  burnt  offerings  and 
thy  peace  offerings,  thy  sheep  and  thy  oxen.  In  every 
place  where  I  cause  My  name  to  be  remembered  I  will  come 
unto  and  bless  thee."  In  the  Levitical  law  ''the  altar" 
is  to  be  of  Shittim  or  acacia  wood  overlaid  with  copper, 
and  the  place  for  it  is  to  be  in  the  court  of  the  Tabernacle. 
There  all  sacrifices  are  to  be  offered,  and  thither  every 
slaughtered  animal  is  to  be  brought  (Lev.  xvii.  i  ff.),  and 
this  is  to  be  a  statute  for  ever  unto  them  throughout  their 
generations.  In  Deuteronomy  again  (chap,  xii.)  it  is 
enacted  that  all  sacrifices  are  to  be  brought  "unto  the 
place  which  Yahweh  your  God  shall  choose  out  of  all 
your  tribes  to  put  His  name  there,"  and  ver.  21,  "If  the 
place  which  Yahweh  thy  God  hath  chosen  to  put  His 
name  there  be  too  far  from  thee,  then  thou  shalt  kill  of 
thy  herd  and  of  thy  flock  "  and  eat  them  as  game  was 
eaten  without  bringing  it  to  the  Sanctuary.  But  Moses 
is  not  represented  as  ordering  this  law  to  be  introduced 
immediately.  It  is  only  when  they  go  over  Jordan  and 
dwell  in  the  land  which  Yahweh  their  God  giveth  them, 
and  when  He  giveth  them  rest  from  all  their  enemies 
round  about  so  that  they  dwell  in  safety,  that  they  are  to 
do  this.  Nay,  according  to  ver.  20  the  new  order  is  to 
be  fully  introduced  only  when  Yahweh  their  God  shall 
enlarge  their  border  as  He  had  promised,  i.e.  when  their 
boundaries  should  be  (xi.  24)  the  wilderness  on  the 
south  and  Lebanon  on  the  north,  the  Euphrates  on  the 
east  and  the  Mediterranean  on  the  west.  Now  these 
boundaries  were  attained  only  in  David's  day,  and   the 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY  15 

rest  from  all  their  enemies  round  about  was,  as  Dillmann 
says,  given  as  a  matter  of  fact  only  in  the  times  of  David 
and  Solomon  (cf.  2  Sam.  vii.  ii  and  i  Kings  v.  18),  not- 
withstanding Josh.  xxi.  42.  Consequently  the  Temple  at 
Jerusalem  must  have  been  the  place  referred  to.  This  is 
distinctly  the  view  of  i  Kings  iii.  3  and  viii.  16.  The 
latter  passage  is  peculiarly  emphatic.  Solomon  says,  at 
the  dedication  of  the  Temple,  '*  Since  the  day  that  I 
brought  forth  My  people  Israel  out  of  Egypt,  I  chose  no 
city  out  of  all  the  tribes  of  Israel  to  build  an  house  that 
My  name  might  be  therein."  The  Deuteronomic  view 
consequently  is  that  the  law  requiring  sacrifice  at  one 
sole  altar  was  intended  by  Moses  to  be  enforced  only 
after  the  Temple  at  Jerusalem  had  been  built. 

These  are  the  provisions  of  the  three  codes.  Can  they 
have  been  the  successive  ordinances  of  a  man  legislating 
under  the  influence  of  Divine  inspiration  within  a  period  of 
less  than  forty  years  ?  Let  us  see.  The  first  legislation 
was  given  at  Sinai,  in  the  third  month  after  the  Exodus  : 
the  Levitical  legislation  on  the  matter  was  given  about 
nine  months  later  when  the  Tabernacle  was  finished, 
and  during  that  time  they  had  not  removed  from  Sinai : 
thirty-eight  years  afterwards  the  Deuteronomic  code  was 
given  in  the  plains  of  Moab.  Let  us  look  at  the  cha- 
racter of  the  legislation  given  first  of  all  at  Sinai.  The 
meaning  of  the  decisive  phrase,  ''  In  every  place  where  I 
cause  My  name  to  be  remembered  I  will  come  unto  thee 
and  bless  thee,"  has  been  much  discussed ;  yet  taken  as  it 
stands,  without  reference  to  laws  which  on  any  supposition 
are  later,  it  cannot  mean  that  sacrifices  were  to  be  offered 
only  at  one  central  shrine.  It  specially  provides  for 
sacrifices  being  offered  at  different  places,  but  restricts 
them  to  places  which  Yahweh  Himself  has  chosen.  At 
ever}^  such  place  He  promises  to  come  to  them  and  bless 
them.     So  much,  men  of  all  schools  admit ;  difference  of 


i6  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

opinion  arises  only  as  to  whether  these  places  are  meant 
to  be  successive,  or  whether  they  may  be  simultaneous. 
The  view  of  those  who  accept  all  the  legislation  of  the 
Pentateuch  as  Mosaic  in  the  strict  sense  is  that  the 
places  could  only  be  successive,  since  otherwise  the  words 
would  imply  that  originally  worship  at  one  altar  was  not 
prescribed.  Delitzsch,  for  example,  maintains  that  these 
words  imply  necessarily  only  this,  that  the  place  of 
sacrifice  would,  in  the  course  of  time,  be  altered  by 
Divine  appointment,  and  he  declares  that  to  be  their 
meaning.  Others,  again,  suppose  that  the  command  was 
meant  only  to  justify  worship  at  the  various  places  where 
the  Tabernacle  was '"called  to  halt  on  the  people's  journey- 
ings,  whether  in  the  wilderness  or  in  Palestine.  Now 
it  cannot  be  denied  that  only  on  some  such  interpre- 
tation can  Exodus  be  brought  into  harmony  with  Leviticus, 
and  that  undoubtedly  has  influenced,  and  rightly  so,  the 
scholars  who  take  this  view.  If  it  were  tenable  it  would 
be  by  far  the  most  satisfactory  interpretation.  But  it  can 
hardly  be  considered  tenable  if  we  look  at  the  time  at 
which  this  law  was  given.  There  was  as  yet  no  other 
law,  and  this  was  given  as  soon  as  the  people  came  to 
Mount  Sinai.  The  law  in  Leviticus  was  not  on  any 
supposition  given  till  nine  months  later.  Now,  if 
Exod.  XX.  24  was  meant  for  immediate  use  only,  and  was 
superseded  by  the  Levitical  law  after  so  short  a  time, 
it  is  difficult  to  understand  why  it  was  given,  and  still 
more  difficult  to  conceive  why  it  was  preserved.  In  any 
case  it  cannot  have  been  understood  to  command  worship 
at  only  one  place.  It  could  have  no  other  sense  than  that 
the  people,  so  long  as  they  were  at  Sinai,  were  to  sacrifice 
only  at  Sinai  where  Yahweh  had  revealed  Himself,  or 
at  other  places  in  the  neighbourhood  which  He  should 
sanctify,  or  had  sanctified,  by  revealing  His  presence  at 
them.     At  any  such  place,  if  there  He  had  once  revealed 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY  17 

Himself,  He  would  continue  to  meet  them.  Without  the 
colour  thrown  upon  them  by  succeeding  laws,  that  is 
surely  the  only  meaning  that  could  be  put  upon  the  words, 
and  so  understood  they  undoubtedly  authorise  sacrifice 
at  two  or  more  places  simultaneously.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  this  law  was  meant  more  for  the  future  than  the 
present,  as  some  of  the  laws  in  the  Book  of  the  Covenant 
undoubtedly  were,  it  must  have  been  intended  to  be  in 
force  concurrently  with  Lev.  i.  f.  But  if  so,  the  "  places  " 
it  refers  to  cannot  be  the  mere  halting-places  on  the 
wilderness  journey.  No  doubt  these  were  determined 
by  Yahweh,  and  the  tabernacle  was  set  up  at  places  He 
may  be  said  to  have  chosen,  but  the  places  themselves 
were  of  no  consequence  at  all.  The  Divine  presence 
is  declared  to  be  always  in  the  Tabernacle.  That  was 
certainly  a  place  where  Yahweh  caused  His  name  to  be 
remembered,  and  without  further  inquiry  about  place,  the 
men  of  Israel  knew  that  He  would  always  meet  them  and 
bless  them  in  sacrifice  there.  The  different  character  of 
the  altar  in  the  Book  of  the  Covenant  too,  a  mere  heap 
of  earth  or  unhewn  stone,  and  that  in  the  Tabernacle, 
made  of  acacia  wood  overlaid  with  copper,  corroborates 
the  view  that  the  altar  aimed  at  in  Exod.  xxiv.  is  not 
the  Tabernacle  altar.  The  only  coherent  view,  on  the 
supposition  of  the  concurrence  of  the  two  laws,  is  there- 
fore that  while,  as  a  rule,  sacrifice  was  to  be  offered  at 
the  Tabernacle,  yet  if  the  people  came  to  any  place  where 
Yahweh  had  caused  His  name  to  be  remembered,  sacri- 
fice might  be  offered  there  on  an  altar  of  earth  or  unhewn 
stone,  as  well  as  at  the  Tabernacle.  Either  way  there- 
fore there  is  permission  to  worship  at  more  than  one 
place.  But  then  the  difficulty  is  that  Leviticus  appears 
to  denounce  upon  pain  of  being  "  cut  off  from  the  people  " 
absolutely  every  sacrifice  not  offered  at  the  Tabernacle. 
Now  if  so  far  matters  have  been  far  from  clear  on  the 

2 


1 8  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

traditional  supposition    of  the   date   and   order  of  these 
codes,    a  glance  at  Deuteronomy  will  produce   absolute 
confusion  in  every  mind.     As  we  have  seen,  Deuteronomy 
represents  Moses  as  restricting  sacrifice  most  rigorously 
to  one  altar  after  the  building  of  the  Temple  at  Jerusalem, 
but  virtually  declaring  that   worship   at  various  shrines 
was  to  be  blameless  until  that  time.     We  have  also  seen 
that  that  is  the  view  taken   by  the  author  of  the  Book 
of  Kings.     Now  this  might  be  regarded  as  a  temporary 
relaxation  of  the  law,  intended  to  meet  the  difficult  circum- 
stances of  a  period  of  war  and  conquest,  were  it  not  for 
one  thing.     That  is,   that  Moses  in    Deut.   xii.    8,   after 
prescribing  worship  at  one  altar,  adds,  "  Ye  shall  not  do 
after  all  that  we  do  here  this  day,  every  man  whatsoever 
is  right  in  his  own  eyes,"  and  as  if  to  render  mistake  as 
to  the  meaning  impossible,  in  ver.  13  he  explains  ver.  8 
thus :    "  Take    heed    to   th3^self  that   thou  offer  not  thy 
burnt  offerings  in  every  place  that  thou  seest."     Notwith- 
standing the  efforts  of  conservative  scholars  like  Keil  and 
Bredenkamp  to  explain  ver.  8  as  a  reference  to  the  inter- 
missions in,  e.g.f  the  daily  sacrifice,  brought  about  by  the 
desert  wanderings,   or  to  the  arbitrariness  and  illegality 
of   the    generation   which   had    brought  judgment   upon 
themselves  by  refusal  to  obey  Yahweh  in  attacking  Canaan, 
it  still  seems  impossible  to  accept  that  view.     Of  course 
if  we  knew  that  Moses  was  the  giver  of  all  these  laws, 
these  words  would  have  to  be  explained  away  in  some 
such  fashion.     But  if  they  are  approached  by  an  inquirer 
seeking  to  discover  whether  they  all  are  Mosaic,  sound 
exegesis  demands  that  they  should  be  taken  as  Dillmann 
and    others   take   them.     In   the    plain    sense   of   words 
Moses  here  admits  that,  up  till  the  time  at  which  he  is 
speaking,  sacrifices  were  offered  wherever  men  chose,  and 
that  he  had  participated  in  the  practice.     And  observe, 
he  does  not  refer  to  the  Levitical  law.     He  does  not  say 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY  19 

this  conduct  of  ours  is  a  sin  which  we  must  repent  of 
and  turn  from  at  once.  He  calmly  permits  this  state 
of  things  to  continue  after  Israel  is  in  Canaan,  and  looks 
forward  with  equanimity  to  its  continuance  till  the  Temple 
shall  be  erected  in  Jerusalem.  With  this  passage  before 
us  we  ask,  Can  this  be  the  same  inspired  legislator  who 
thirty-eight  years  before  compelled  sacrifice  at  one  central 
altar  on  pain  of  death  ? 

The  traditional  hypothesis  being  thus  encompassed 
with  difficulties,  students  of  the  Old  Testament  have 
sought  another  which  would  correspond  better  with  all 
the  data.  Relying  upon  the  fact  that  the  author  of 
Deuteronomy  founds  his  book  almost  entirely  on  JE, 
and  that  if  he  knows  some  of  the  laws  and  some  of  the 
facts  mentioned  in  P  only,  there  are  no  proofs  that  he 
knew  that  book  as  we  have  it,  they  put  it  aside  in 
this  matter  also.  Immediately,  when  that  is  done,  light 
breaks  in  upon  our  problem.  If  we  take  Exod.  xxiv.  20 
in  the  natural  sense  given  to  it  above,  sacrifice  at  various 
altars  was  permitted  from  Sinai  onwards,  the  only  limita- 
tion being  that  there  should  have  been,  at  the  place 
chosen,  authentic  proof  of  a  theophany  or  some  other 
manifestation  of  the  Divine  presence.  That  is  the  state  of 
things  out  of  which  Moses  speaks  in  Deuteronomy.  It  will 
be  noticed,  however,  that  there  is  a  slight  contradiction 
of  Exod.  XX.  24.  The  Moses  of  Deuteronomy  speaks  as 
if  every  man's  arbitrary  choice  had  been  his  only  guide. 
Probably,  however,  with  his  mind  full  of  the  stringent  unity 
he  desires  to  see,  he  speaks  hyperbolical  ly  of  the  looseness 
of  the  former  law,  and  means  nothing  else  than  the 
practice  prescribed  by  it.  In  all  ways  this  view  is  sup- 
ported by  the  history.  From  the  patriarchs  till  the  time 
of  Samuel,  the  practice  was  to  sacrifice  at  various  altars.^ 

^  Cf.   for   the  passages  on  which  this  staLement   is   founded   Driver's 
Introduction,  p.  80,  and  note  in  small  print. 


20  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Consequently,  according  to  both  the  Book  of  the  Cove- 
nant and  Deuteronomy,  and  according  to  the  history, 
the  worship  of  Yahweh  at  sacred  places  throughout 
the  land  was  legal,  until  the  Temple  was  erected  at 
Jerusalem.  The  centralisation  of  worship  was,  conse- 
quently, a  new  thing  when  the  division  of  the  kingdoms 
took  place,  and  was  not  an  express  law  till  Deuteronomy. 
If  that  book  was  not  written  till  perhaps  Hezekiah's  day, 
the  fact  will  account  as  nothing  else  will  do  for  Elijah's 
words  (i  Kings  xix.  lo),  "The  children  of  Israel  have 
forsaken  Thy  covenant,  thrown  down  Thine  altars,  and 
slain  Thy  prophets  with  the  sword."  Even  in  the 
presence  of  Yahweh  he,  without  rebuke,  calls  the  altars 
in  the  Northern  Kingdom  His. 

The  first  attempt  we  know  of  to  centralise  worship  was 
made  by  Hezekiah  ;  a  second  and  more  strenuous  attempt 
was  made  under  Josiah,  but  the  work  was  not  actually 
accomplished  till  after  the  Return  from  the  Captivity.  All 
the  facts  taken  together  suggest  that  the  movement  towards 
centralisation  was  an  age-long  development.  At  first 
all  holy  places  might  be  sacrificed  at,  though  a  certain 
primacy  belonged  to  a  central  sanctuary,  and  this  may 
have  been  stamped  by  Moses  with  approval.  When  the 
Solomonic  Temple  was  built  the  primacy  began  to  take  the 
form  of  a  claim  for  exclusive  validity.  The  experiences 
in  both  kingdoms  strengthened  that  claim,  by  showing 
that  if  Yahwism  was  to  be  kept  pure  the  worship  at  the 
High  Places  must  be  abolished.  The  inspired  writer  of 
Deuteronomy  then  completed  Moses*  work  by  embodying 
that  which  had  been  always  a  tendency  of  the  Mosaic 
system,  and  had  now  become  a  necessity,  in  his  revisal  of 
the  Mosaic  legislation.  This  was  adopted  by  the  nation 
under  Josiah,  and  the  Priest  Codex  must  in  that  case 
represent  a  later  stage  of  the  development,  when  the 
centralisation  was  neither  a  tendency  nor  a  demand,  but 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY         21 


a  realised  fact.  Such  a  process  accounts  much  better 
for  the  facts  than  the  traditional  belief;  and  though  it  is 
not  free  from  difficulties  it  at  least  releases  us  from  the 
confusion  of  mind  which  the  ordinary  supposition  forces 
upon  us. 

The  inquiry  as  to  the  agents  or  the  cultus  need  not 
detain  us  so  long.  In  the  Book  of  the  Covenant  no 
priests  are  mentioned  at  all.  The  person  addressed,  the 
''  thou "  of  these  chapters,  which  is  either  the  individual 
Israelite  or  the  whole  community,  has  been  held  by  some  to 
indicate  that  the  individual  offerer  was  the  only  agent  in 
sacrifice.  But  that  is  to  press  tlie  word  too  far.  Even  in 
Leviticus,  while  the  whole  people  are  addressed,  the  actions 
enjoined  or  prohibited  are  such  as  are  done  by  "  any  man 
of  them,"  and  in  Deut.  xii.  13  we  have  precisely  the 
same  expression,  "  Take  heed  to  thyself  that  thou  offer 
not  thy  burnt  offerings  in  every  place  that  thou  seest," 
used  at  a  time  when  there  was  undeniably  a  priestly  tribe 
and  even  the  High  Places  had  a  regular  priesthood.  But 
while  in  Exod.  xx. — xxiii.  there  is  no  evidence  to  show 
whether  a  priesthood  existed,  in  the  previous  chapter 
(xix.  22,  24)  priests  who  "  come  near  to  Yahweh  "  are 
twice  mentioned.  This  would  be  a  fact  of  the  first  im- 
portance were  it  not  that  the  words  occur  in  a  passage 
which  is  admitted  to  be  in  its  present  shape  the  work 
of  the  later  editor.  Dillmann  maintains,  and  with  good 
reason,  that  he  has  inserted  and  adapted  here  a  fragment 
of  J.  If  so  then  J  may  have  held  the  view  that  there  were 
priests  before  Sinai  was  reached,  but  under  the  circum- 
stances we  cannot  be  certain  that  the  mention  of  them 
may  not  be  an  anachronism  introduced  by  the  later  hand. 
In  favour  of  the  view  that  it  is  so  is  the  fact  that  in  the 
account  given  by  JE  of  the  ratification  of  the  Covenant 
between  Yahweh  and  the  people  (Exod.  xxiv.  i  fif.),  Moses 
erected   an   altar   and    then    ''  sent   the   young    men    of 


22  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


the  children  of  Israel  which  offered  burnt  offerings  and 
sacrificed  peace  offerings  of  oxen  unto  Yahweh."  He 
himself  however  performed  the  specially  priestly  act  of 
sprinkling  the  blood  upon  the  altar.  Had  there  been 
priests  or  Levites  accustomed  to  perform  priestly  functions, 
we  should  have  expected  them  to  act,  instead  of  "  the 
young  men  of  the  children  of  Israel."  But,  on  the  other 
hand,  we  must  not  omit  to  notice  that  the  Levites  occupy 
in  all  these  transactions,  as  narrated  by  JE,  a  very  promi- 
nent position.  Dillmann,^  as  we  have  seen,  separating 
J  and  E,  considers  that  the  passages  in  which  priests 
before  the  Sinaitic  legislation  are  spoken  of  belong  to  J, 
and  adds  :  "  Indeed,  it  appears  from  Exod.  iv.  14,  'Is  not 
Aaron  the  Levite  thy  brother?'  and  xxiv.  I,  9,  that  for 
him  even  then  the  Levites  were  the  priestly  persons." 
To  these  passages  Driver  adds  Exod.  xviii.  12:  "And 
Jethro,  Moses'  father-in-law,  took  a  burnt  offering  and 
sacrifices  for  God ;  and  Aaron  came,  and  all  the  elders  of 
Israel,  to  eat  bread  with  Moses'  father-in-law  before  God." 
Further,  Nadab  and  Abihu  are  Levites,  nay,  sons  of  Aaron, 
and  in  Exod.  xxiv.  i  and  9  they  go  with  Moses,  Aaron, 
and  the  seventy  elders  as  the  complete  representation  of 
the  people,  and  Moses,  himself  a  Levite,  performs  all  the 
greater  priestly  acts.^  Moreover  JE  knows  of  the  ark, 
and  speaks  frequently  of  the  ''  tent  of  meeting  "  (Exod. 
xxxiii.  /fif.  ;  Numb.  xi.  24  f.,  xii.  4ff.  and  Deut.  xxxi. 
14  ff.).  •  But  a  very  notable  thing  in  connection  with  the 
inquiry  as  to  the  performers  of  priestly  duties  appears  in 
Exod.  xxxiii.  7  fT.,  where  E's  account  of  the  **  tent  of 
meeting  "  is  given.  When  Moses  turned  again  into  the 
camp  "  his  minister  (jnesharetho)  Joshua,  the  son  of  Nun, 
a  young  man,  departed  not  out  of  the  tent,"  yet  Joshua 


'  Dillmann,  Exodus  and  Leviticus,  p.  199, 
^  Josh.  iii.  14-17  sind  passim. 


AUTHORSHIP  AND   AGE  OF  DEUTERONOMY  23 

was  an  Ephraimite  (i  Chron.  vii.  22-27).  ^^  Exod.  xxxii. 
29,  however,  the  same  authority  describes  the  consecration 
of  the  Levites  to  the  priesthood,  after  the  apostasy  of  the 
golden  calf. 

In  Deuteronomy,  on  the  contrary,  the  priests  are  very 
prominent ;  they  are  called,  however,  the  Levitical  priests, 
or  priests  simply,  but  never  sons  of  Aaron.  The  whole 
tribe  of  Levi  is  regarded  as  priestly  in  some  sense.  They 
constitute,  in  fact,  a  clerical  order,  though  there  are  clear 
indications  of  ranks,  of  men  being  assigned  to  special 
duties.  Curiously  enough,  the  tribe  thus  highly  honoured 
is  spoken  of  as  being  notoriously  and  all  but  universally 
poor.  No  sacrifice  can  legitimately  be  offered  without 
them  ;  and,  though  the  question  of  the  place  of  sacrifice  has 
not  yet  been  finally  settled,  the  position  of  the  Levitical 
priests  as  sacrificers  is  so  entirely  established  that  it  is 
regarded  as  needing  neither  assertion  nor  justification. 
Nay,  in  one  passage,  Deut.  x.  6 — which  there  is  no 
valid  reason,  except  the  wish  to  get  rid  of  its  contents, 
for  supposing  to  belong  to  another  authority  than  D  ^ — the 
hereditary  succession  to  the  chief  place  among  the  priest- 
hood is  assigned  to  the  family  of  Aaron.  In  xviii.  5  also 
the  hereditary  character  of  the  priesthood  is  asserted  in 
the  words,  *'  For  Yahweh  thy  God  hath  chosen  him — i.e. 
the  priest — out  of  all  thy  tribes,  to  stand  to  minister  in 
the  name  of  Yahweh,  Iiitn  and  his  sons  for  ever.'^  As  for 
the  body  of  the  Levites,  their  position  is  somewhat  ill- 
defined.  On  the  authority  of  xviii.  6  ff.  many  claim  that 
at  the  date  of  Deuteronomy  every  Levite  was,  at  least 
potentially,  a  priest,  that  in  fact  Levite  and  priest  were 
synonymous.  But,  as  will  appear  in  the  exposition  of  the 
verses  referred  to,  that  is  a  very  questionable  proposition. 


'  Driver,  Inirodrtdton,  p,  145  ;  Oettli,  Deuteronomy,  ^p.  7;  Kuenen,  H.K. 
O.,  p.  113. 


24  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Nevertheless  it  cannot  be  denied  that  in  Deuteronomy  the 
line  between  priests |  and  Levites  is  a  very  indistinct  one  ; 
there  is  prima  facte  reason  to  believe  that  it  could  be 
passed,  and  the  gap  between  the  two  is  certainly  not  nearly 
so  wide  as  it  appears  to  be  in  the  undeniably  post-exilic 
literature. 

In  the  Priest  Codex  again,  the  priesthood  is  confined 
exclusively  to  the  house  of  Aaron,  with  the  high  priest 
at  their  head.  The  Levites  have  no  possible  way  of 
entrance  into  the  priesthood.  They  are  Yahweh's  gift  to 
the  priests,  and  are  confined  most  strictly  to  the  duty  of 
waiting  upon  these  in  the  ministration  of  the  Sanctuary. 
They  have  none  but  the  most  subordinate  share  in  the 
sacrifices ;  they  are  shut  out  from  the  holy  places  of  the 
Tabernacle ;  and  they  have  assigned  to  them  cities  in 
which  they  may  dwell  together  when  they  are  not  on 
duty  at  the  Sanctuary.  There  is  no  word  there  of  Levites 
being  poor,  and  altogether  the  position  of  the  tribe  is, 
through  the  priests,  much  more  dignified  and  prosperous 
in  a  worldly  sense  than  we  found  it  to  be  in  Deuteronomy. 

Now,  taking  all  these  data  together,  we  find  here,  just 
as  we  did  in  the  previous  section,  that  the  Levitical  law 
is  a  disturbing  element  between  Exodus  and  Deuteronomy. 
If  we  take  it  out  of  the  way,  J,  E,  and  D  harmonise  well 
enough.  The  main  difference  is  that  the  latter  shows 
the  same  fundamental  conditions  as  we  find  in  the  former, 
only  consolidated  and  developed  by  time,  but  by  a  longer 
time  than  forty  years.  In  fact  D  makes  explicit  that 
importance  of  the  Levites  which  is  only  hinted  at  and 
foreshadowed  in  JE.  They  have  come  to  be  the  only 
authorised  agents  of  sacrifice ;  they  have  a  hereditary 
headship  in  the  house  of  Aaron ;  various  orders  and 
degrees  must  be  held  to  exist  (cf  Deut.  xviii.  i  ff). 
Compared  with  this  state  of  things,  the  Levitical  arrange- 
ments of  P,  supposed  to  have  been  given  thirty-eight  years 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY  25 

before,  are  very  different.  In  every  respect  they  are  more 
definite,  more  detailed,  and  show  a  much  more  differ- 
entiated organisation  than  those  sketched  in  Deuteronom}^ 
These  latter  indicate  a  state  of  matters  which  would  suit 
admirably  as  an  embryonic  stage  of  the  full-grown 
Levitical  system,  and  which  can  hardly  be  fitted  into 
their  place  otherwise. 

It  is  suggested,  in  reply,  that  allusions  in  Deuteronomy 
imply  the  existence  of  a  system  of  a  much  more  elaborate 
kind  than  any  that  we  could  construct  from  the  explicit 
statements  of  the  book,  and  that  is  certainly  true.  But 
no  reasonable  interpretation  of  these  allusions  can  lead 
us  to  a  system  identical  with  that  in  P.  Nor  can  Deuter- 
onomy's use  of  the  name  Levites  (though  undoubtedly 
it  has  been  pressed  by  some  too  far)  be  held  to  be  con- 
sistent with  the  public  recognition  of  the  "  great  gulf 
fixed  "  in  P  between  the  Aaronic  priests  and  the  Levites 
as  a  body.  Nor  will  the  fact  that  Deuteronomy  is  the 
people's  book,  and  is  consequently  not  called  upon  to  go 
into  technical  details,  cover  the  difference.  Indeed  nothing 
will,  short  of  recognising  the  fact  that,  as  publicly  acknow- 
ledged organisations,  the  tribe  of  Levi  in  P  and  the  tribe 
of  Levi  in  D  are  different,  and  that  the  state  of  things  in 
D's  day  is  earlier  than  that  in  P.  If  this  is  not  so,  then 
the  Levitical  legislation,  conceived  as  given  by  Moses, 
must  be  held  to  have  proved  impracticable,  and  Deuter- 
onomy must  then  be  regarded  as  an  abrogation  of  it  for 
the  time. 

And  the  same  conclusions  suggest  themselves  if  we 
look  more  closely  into  the  curious  fact  that  Deuteronomy 
always  speaks  of  the  Levites  as  poor.  Some  have  supposed 
that  this  poverty  is  the  result  of  the  centralisation  of  the 
cultus  which  the  author  demands,  and  that  the  constant 
insistence  that  the  Levite  shall  be  invited  to  all  sacrificial 
feasts,  along  with  the  widow  and  the  orphan,  and  other 


26  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

helpless  classes,  is  a  provision  against  the  poverty  to  be 
brought  upon  them  by  the  abolition  of  the  High  Places. 
But  that  is  not  so.  We  know  the  manner  of  the  Deuter- 
onomist  when  he  is  providing  for  contingencies  arising 
from  the  new  state  of  things  he  wishes  to  bring  about, 
and  it  is  quite  different  from  his  manner  here.  Clearly, 
the  Levites  were  poor  before  the  suppression  of  the  High 
Places,  and  were  so,  as  Deuteronomy  tells  us,  from  the 
fact  that  they  had  no  inheritance  in  the  land.  But  that 
poverty  is  not  consistent  with  their  whole  position  as 
sketched  in  the  Levitical  legislation.  There  we  have 
the  Levites  launched  as  a  regularly  organised  priestly 
corporation,  endowed  with  ample  revenues,  and  ruled 
and  represented  by  a  high  priest  of  the  family  of 
Aaron,  clothed  with  powers  almost  royal,  surrounded  by  a 
priestly  nobility  of  his  own  family  and  by  a  bodyguard  of 
tribesmen  entirely  at  his  disposal.  Such  a  body  never 
has  remained  chronically  and  notoriously  poor.  In  the 
wilderness  they  would  not  be  so  in  contrast  with  others, 
for  all  were  poor,  and  there  was  nothing  to  hinder  the 
Levites  having  cattle  as  the  other  tribes  had,  and  being 
on  the  same  level  as  they.  In  the  promised  land,  instead 
of  becoming  poor,  they  would  at  once  enter  upon  the 
enjoyment  of  their  various  tithes  and  dues,  and  would 
moreover  have  such  a  share  in  the  booty  of  Canaan  as 
would  more  than  make  up  at  first  for  their  want  of  a 
heritage.  The  priests  were  to  receive  one  five-hundredth 
part  of  the  army's  half,  and  the  Levites  the  fiftieth  share 
of  the  people's  half  (Numb.  xxxi.  28  fi".).  Gradually,  too, 
they  would  be  put  in  possession  of  the  priestl}^  cities. 
Evidently,  therefore,  if  the  Levites  were  ever  poor,  it  cannot 
have  been  till  some  time  after  Israel  had  been  settled  in 
the  land,  and  then  only  if  P's  laws  and  organisations  of 
the  tribe  were  not  enforced. 

Deuteronomy    supports    the    same    argument.       Since 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE  OF  DEUTERONOMY         27 

want  of  a  heritage  was  the  cause  of  the  Levites'  poverty, 
they  cannot  have  been  exceptionally  poor  in  the  wilder- 
ness. Nor  can  they  have  been  poor  during  the  time 
of  the  conquest ;  for  even  if  the  Levitical  law  was  in 
force  and  the  tribe  was  then  wholly  organised  for  the 
priesthood,  they  must  have  shared  in  the  fighting  and 
the  spoil.  But  if  the  order  of  legislation,  as  we  maintain, 
was  (i)  Exodus  xx. — xxiii.,  (2)  Deuteronomy,  (3)  the 
Priest  Codex,  then  as  the  booty  from  war  ceased  to 
be  a  source  of  income,  the  Levites  as  a  body  remaining 
nomads,  while  the  other  tribes  became  agricultural,  would 
necessarily  become  poor  in  comparison  with  their  fellow- 
countrymen.  It  is  out  of  that  state  of  things  the  Deuter- 
onomist  speaks.^ 

The  same  conclusions  follow  when  the  regulations  are 
examined  which  bear  upon  the  support  of  the  priestly 
tribe.  The  outstanding  matters  in  this -department  are 
tithes  and  firstlings.  Space  will  not  admit  of  a  full  dis- 
cussion of  these  topics  ;  but  if  the  reader  will  compare,  in 
regard  to  tithes,  Numb,  xviii.  21-24  ^^^  Lev.  xxvii.  30,  32, 
with  Deut.  xii.  17,  and  in  regard  to  firstlings  Numb,  xviii. 
18  with  Deut.  xii.  6,  17  f,  and  xv.  19  f,  he  will  see  that 
the  application  of  tithes  and  of  firstlings  according  to 
Deuteronomy  is  quite  different  from  that  in  the  Levitical 
legislation.  The  difference  is  such  as  will  not  comport 
with  the  hypothesis  of  a  single  legislator  and  a  consistent 
legislation.  Expedients  with  a  view  to  solve  the  difficulty 
have  been  suggested  by  Keil  and  others  ;  but  each  of  those 
expedients  is  burdened  with  specific  difficulties  of  its  own. 

The  inevitable  conclusion  from  all  thss  would  seem  to 
be  that  in  the  Deuteronomic  as  in  the  Levitical  laws  we 
have  not  the  legislation  of  Moses  or  of  his  age  alone. 
The  roots  of  all  the  legislative  codes  are  Mosaic,  but  in  all 

^  See  further  in  exposition  of  chapter  xvii ;  xviii. 


28  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

save  perhaps  the  Book  of  the  Covenant  the  trunk  and 
branches  are  of  much  later  growth.  The  authors  of  them 
are  not  careful  to  distinguish  what  came  from  Moses 
himself  from  that  which  had  been  developed  out  of  it 
under  the  influence  of  the  same  inspiration.  In  both 
D  and  P  there  were  Mosaic  elements,  and  in  both  there 
are  laws  not  given  by  him.  To  disentangle  these  com- 
pletely now  is  impossible,  and  it  is  probably  best  for 
expository  purposes  to  take  the  codes  as  giving  what  the 
Mosaic  legislation  had  become  at  the  time  of  the  writer. 
What  we  have  in  Deuteronomy  therefore  cannot  be  better 
described  than  in  Driver's  words  {Intro diidion^  p.  85),  as 
"  the  prophetic  re-formulation  and  adaptation  to  new  needs 
of  an  older  legislation."  Its  relations  to  the  other  codes 
are  as  the  same  critic  states  (p.  71)  :  "It  is  an  expansion 
of  that  in  JE  (Exod.  xx. — xxiii.) ;  it  is,  in  several  features, 
parallel  to  that  in  Lev.  xvii. — xxvi.  ;  it  contains  allusions 
to  laws  such  as  those  codified  in  some  parts  of  P,  while 
from  those  contained  in  other  parts  of  P  it  differs  widely." 
And  the  state  of  things  in  which  these  various  codes 
originated  is  more  and  more  coming  to  be  conceived  in 
the  manner  stated  by  Dr.  A.  B.  Davidson.^  ^'  It  is 
evident,"  he  says,  *'  that  two  streams  of  thought,  both 
issuing  from  a  fountain  as  high  up  as  the  very  origin  of 
the  nation,  ran  side  by  side  down  the  whole  history  of  the 
people,  the  prophetic  and  the  priestly.  In  the  one  Jehovah 
is  a  moral  ruler,  a  righteous  king  and  judge,  who  punishes 
iniquity  judicially  or  forgives  sins  freely  of  His  mercy. 
In  the  other  He  is  a  Person  dwelling  among  His  people 
in  a  house,  a  Holy  Being  or  Nature,  sensitive  to  every 
uncleanness  in  all  that  is  near  Him,  and  requiring  its 
removal  by  lustrations  and  atonement.  Those  cherishing 
the  latter  circle  of  conceptions  might  be  as  zealous  for  the 

*  Ezekielf  Introduction,  p.  liv.  f, 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY         29 

Lord  of  Hosts  as  the  prophets.  And  the  developments 
of  the  national  history  would  extend  their  conceptions  and 
lead  to  the  amplification  of  practices  embodying  them,  just 
as  they  extended  the  conceptions  01  the  prophets.  A 
growth  of  priestly  ideas  is  quite  as  probable  as  a  growth 
of  prophetic  ideas.  That  the  streams  ran  apart  is  no 
evidence  that  they  were  not  equally  ancient  and  always 
contemporaneous,  for  we  see  Jeremiah  and  Ezekiel  both 
flourishing  in  one  age.  At  one  point  in  the  history  the 
prophetic  stream  was  swelled  by  an  inflow  from  the  priestly, 
as  is  seen  in  Deuteronomy,  and  from  the  Restoration 
downwards  both  streams  appear  to  coalesce." 

The  actual  date  of  Deuteronomy  still  remains  to  be 
settled.  Already  it  has  been  brought  down  to  post- 
Solomonic  days.  How  much  later  must  it  probably  be 
put  ?  The  book  must  have  been  written  before  the 
eighteenth  year  of  Josiah,  621  B.C.,  for  the  Book  of  the 
Law  which  was  then  found  in  the  Temple  was  un- 
doubtedly not  the  whole  Pentateuch,  but  approximately 
Deut.  i. — xxvi.  But  it  can  hardly  have  been  produced 
in  Josiah's  reign,  because  it  would  never  have  been 
permitted  to  drop  out  of  sight  had  it  been  known  to 
that  pious  king  and  the  reforming  high  priest  Hilkiah. 
On  the  other  h-and,  it  can  hardly  have  been  written  or 
known  before  Hezekiah's  reforms,  for  otherwise  it  would 
have  been  made  the  basis  of  them,  as  it  was  made 
the  basis  of  Josiah's.  Probably,  therefore,  we  may  date 
it  between  Hezekiah  and  Josiah.  Indeed  we  may  with 
great  likelihood  affirm,  as  Robertson  Smith  suggests,  that 
it  was  the  need  of  guidance  caused  by  Hezekiah's  reforms 
which  suggested  and  called  out  this  book.^ 

But,  say  some,  if  the  body  of  the  book  is  not  Mosaic, 
then  this  is  nothing  else  but  forgery,  and   no  forged  or 

'  Additional  Answer  to  the  Libel,  p.  80- 


30  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

even  pseudonymous  book  can  be  inspired !  Others  again, 
most  gratuitously,  suppose  that  Hilkiah  found  the  book 
only  because  he  had  forged  it  and  put  it  where  it  was  found. 
But  there  is  neither  need  nor  room  for  such  suppositions ; 
and  our  effort  must  be  to  conceive  to  ourselves  the  means 
by  which  such  a  book  could  come  into  existence,  and 
be  found  as  it  was,  without  fraud  on  the  part  ©f  any 
one. 

To  modern,  and  especially  Western  notions,  it  seems 
difficult  to  conceive  any  legitimate  process  by  which  a  book 
of  comparatively  modern  date  could  be  attributed,  so  far  as 
its  main  part  is  concerned,  to  Moses,  and  published  as 
Mosaic.  But  if  we  take  into  account  the  character  of  Deuter- 
onomy as  only  an  extension  and  adaptation  of  the  Book  of 
the  Covenant  set  in  a  framework  of  affectionate  exhortation, 
and  that  all  men  then  believed  that  the  Book  of  the  Coven- 
ant was  Mosaic,  we  can  see  better  how  such  action  might 
be  considered  legitimate.  Even  on  modern  and  Western 
principles  we  can  see  that ;  but  at  that  early  time  and  in 
the  East,  literary  methods  and  literary  ideas  were  so 
different  from  ours  that  there  may  have  been  customs 
which  made  the  publication  of  a  book  in  this  way  not 
only  natural  but  right.  An  example  from  modern  India 
will  make  this  clear.  Among  the  sacred  books  of  the 
Hindus  one  of  the  most  famous  is  the  Laws  of  Manu. 
This  is  a  collection  of  religious,  moral,  and  ceremonial 
laws  much  like  the  Book  of  Leviticus.  It  is  generally 
admitted  that  it  was  not  the  work  of  any  one  man,  but  of 
a  school  of  legal  writers  and  lawgivers  who  lived  at  very 
various  times,  each  of  whom,  with  a  clear  conscience  and 
as  a  matter  of  course,  adapted  the  works  of  his  pre- 
decessors to  the  need  of  his  own  day.  And  this  practice, 
together  with  the  belief  in  its  legitimacy,  survives  to 
this  day.  In  his  Early  Law  and  Custom  (p.  i6i) 
Sir  Henry  Maine  tells  us  that  "A  gentleman  in  a  high 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY         31 

official  position  in  India  has  a  native  friend  who  has 
devoted  his  Hfe  to  preparing  a  new  Book  of  Manu.  He 
does  not,  however,  expect  or  care  that  it  should  be  put  in 
force  by  any  agency  so  ignoble  as  a  British-Indian  Legis- 
lature, deriving  its  powers  from  an  Act  of  Parliament  not 
a  century  old.  He  waits  till  there  arises  a  king  in  India 
who  will  serve  God  and  take  the  law  from  the  new 
*  Manu  '  when  he  sits  in  his  Court  of  Justice."  There 
is  here  no  question  of  fraud.  This  Indian  gentleman 
considers  that  his  book  is  the  Book  of  Manu,  and 
would  be  amazed  if  any  one  should  question  its  identity 
because  he  had  edited  it ;  and  he  supposes  that  the  king  he 
looks  for,  if  he  should  come  in  his  day,  would  accept  and 
act  upon  it  as  a  Divine  authority.  So  strangely  different 
are  Eastern  notions  from  those  of  the  West.  It  is  legiti- 
mate to  suppose  that  this  Eastern  book  originated  in 
something  of  the  same  fashion.  In  the  evil  days  of 
persecution,  when  all  the  prophetic  spokesmen  were  cut 
off,  and  when  the  priests  were  occupying  the  chief 
position  among  the  supporters  of  pure  religion,  some 
pious  man,  inspired,  but  not  with  the  prophetic  inspira- 
tion, set  himself,  like  this  modern  Hindu,  to  re-write  and 
adapt  the  legislation  which  he  believed  to  be  Mosaic  to 
the  needs  of  his  own  day.  Altering  the  fundamental 
points  as  little  as  might  be,  he  developed  it  to  meet  the 
evils  which  were  threatening  the  Mosaic  religion ;  and  he 
inspired  it  with  the  passion  for  righteousness  and  the 
love  of  God  which  had  already  thrilled  the  hearts  of 
faithful  men  in  Israel  through  the  ministry  of  the  great 
prophets.  Hoping  for  the  coming  of  a  king  who  should 
serve  God  and  judge  Israel  out  of  this  new  Book  of  Moses, 
but  while  the  darkness  still  clouded  the  future,  he  died, 
committing  his  book  to  some  temple  chamber  where  he 
might  hope  that  it  would  be  discovered  when  God's  set 
time  should  come.     In  such  a  supposition  there  is  perhaps 


32  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

something  to  shock  the  conventional  theories  of  our  time. 
But,  so  far  as  can  be  seen,  there  is  nothing  to  shock 
any  open-minded  man  who  knows  how  widely  ancient 
and  Eastern  thought  differs  from  modern  and  Western 
thought.  It  is  certain  that  at  this  day  Eastern  men  of 
the  highest  character  and  of  the  most  burning  zeal  for 
religion  would  act  in  this  manner  without  a  qualm  of 
conscience.  We  may  well  believe,  therefore,  that  in 
ancient  days  it  was  the  same.  If  so,  this  was  a  literary 
method  which  inspiration  might  well  use ;  and  the  suppo- 
sition that  Deuteronomy  was  so  produced  is  certainly 
more  consistent  with  its  history  and  character  than  any 
other.  It  explains  how  it  so  exactly  met  the  needs  of 
the  time  and  summed  up  all  its  aspirations ;  and  it  gives 
to  its  claim  of  inspiration  a  new  support  by  laying  bare 
the  circumstances  of  its  birth  and  its  psychological  pre- 
suppositions. 

But  it  may  still  be  asked,  what  are  we  to  think  of  the 
Mosaic  speeches,  which,  as  has  been  seen,  contain,  to 
say  the  least,  much  non-Mosaic  matter  ?  The  answer 
probably  is  that  in  these,  as  in  the  laws,  the  author  relies 
upon  earlier  documents.  From  the  appearance  in  the 
codes  of  laws  which  would  have  little  or  no  meaning  if 
originated  in  the  time  of  the  Deuteronomist,  it  has  rightly 
been  concluded  that  there  are  very  ancient  and  Mosaic 
elements  in  them.  So,  in  the  speeches  there  are  refer- 
ences and  allusions  that  suggest  an  ancient  tradition  of 
a  final  address  of  Moses,  and  perhaps  a  written  account 
of  its  general  purport,  in  which  even  a  hope  that  the 
worship  might  be  centralised  may  have  been  contained.-^ 
This  the  author  has  adapted  to  his  purpose  of  inciting  his 
contemporaries  to  be  faithful  to  the  Mosaic  teaching,  and 
has  woven  into  it  all  that  later  experience  could  suggest 

'  Cf.  Driver,  art.  "Deuteronomy,"  Smith's  Dictionary,  p.  770. 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE   OF  DEUTERONOMY         33 


as  effective  ground  of  exhortation.  So  much  as  that 
all  ancient  historians  would  have  done,  and  some  moderns 
would  do,  without  the  faintest  intention  to  deceive,  or 
any  feeling  of  guilt ;  and  so  much  may  probably  have 
been  done  here.  Delitzsch,^  Robertson  Smith,'-^  and 
Driver  ^  are  all  at  one  as  to  this,  and  in  the  proofs  they 
produce  of  the  necessity  of  accepting  this  view.  In  the 
words  of  Driver,  "  It  is  the  uniform  practice  of  the  Biblical 
historians  in  both  the  Old  and  New  Testaments  to  re- 
present their  characters  as  speaking  in  words  and  phrases 
which  cannot  have  been  those  actually  used,  but  which 
they  themselves  select  and  frame  for  them."  The  speeches 
of  David  in  Samuel  and  Chronicles  serve  for  examples- 
In  Samuel  he  speaks  in  the  language  of  Samuel,  in 
Chronicles  in  the  language  of  Chronicles.  "  In  some  of 
these  cases,"  Driver  continues,  '*  the  authors  no  doubt 
had  information  as  to  what  was  actually  said  on  the 
occasions  in  question,  which  they  recast  in  their  own 
words,  only  preserving,  perhaps,  a  few  characteristic 
expressions  ;  in  other  cases,  they  merely  gave  articulate 
expression  to  the  thoughts  and  feelings  which  it  was 
presumed  that  the  persons  in  question  would  have  en- 
tertained. In  the  Deuteronomic  speeches  both  these 
characteristic  methods  have  probably  been  employed,  and 
we  must  just  accept  the  inspired  record  for  what  it  reveals 
itself  to  be,  setting  aside,  with  the  inevitable  sighs,  our 
own  a  priori  assumptions  of  what  it  ought  to  be." 

These  then  are  the  conclusions  regarding  Deuteronomy 
on  which  the  expositior)  offered  here  will  rest.  They 
have  been  reached  after  a  careful  consideration  of  the 
evidence  on  both  sides,  and  are  stated  here  not  altogether 

*  Pentateuch  Kritische  Studien,  X. 

^  Answer  to   the  Form  of  Libel,   p,    34.      Note  :  where   Arnold  and 
Masson's  Life  of  Milton  are  referred  to. 

^  Art.  "Deuteronomy,"  Smiih's  Bible  Diet,,  pp.  769(7. 


34  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

without  regret.  For,  as  Robertson  Smith  has  well  said/ 
**  to  the  ordinary  believer  the  Bible  is  precious  as  the 
practical  rule  of  faith  and  life  in  which  God  still  speaks 
directly  to  his  heart.  No  criticism  can  be  otherwise  than 
hurtful  to  faith  if  it  shakes  the  confidence  with  which  the 
simple  Christian  turns  to  his  Bible,  assured  that  he  can 
receive  every  message  which  it  brings  to  his  soul  as  a 
message  from  God  Himself."  Now,  though  it  can  be 
demonstrated  that  the  view  ot  Scripture  which  permits 
of  such  conclusions  as  those  stated  above  is  quite 
compatible  with  this  believing  confidence,  there  can  be 
little  doubt  that  Christian  people  will  for  a  time  find  great 
difficulty  in  accepting  this  assurance.  The  transition  from 
the  old  view  of  inspiration,  so  complete,  comprehensible, 
and  effective  as  it  is,  to  the  newer  and  less  definite 
doctrine,  cannot  fail  to  be  trying,  and  the  introduction 
of  it  here  cannot  but  be  a  disturbing  influence  which  it 
would  have  been  greatly  preferable  to  avoid. 

It  is  not  to  be  wondered  at,  therefore,  that  to  the  minds 
of  the  working  ministry  and  of  their  earnest  fellow- 
labourers,  who  come  into  constant  contact  with  the  actual 
needs  of  men,  the  change  should  be  unwelcome.  But  it 
cannot  now,  in  my  judgment,  be  avoided.  Even  the  best 
and  most  scholarly  work  of  those  who  still  hold  the  tradi- 
tional view  does  not  convince.  Rather  it  is  their  writings, 
more  even  than  those  on  the  modern  side,  which  make  it 
clear  that  the  traditional  view  can  no  longer  be  held.  These 
writers  admit  the  facts  upon  which  their  opponents'  case 
rests,  and  then  explain  them  all  away,  harmonising  every- 
thing by  a  crowd  of  hypotheses,  often  scholarly,  generally 
acute,  but  almost  always  such  as  can  be  accepted  only  if  we 
know  beforehand  that  the  view  they  support  is  true.  But 
far  too  many  hypotheses  are  needed.    Each  case  has  to  be 

'  Answer f  pp.  41  f; 


AUTHORSHIP  AND  AGE  OF  DEUTERONOMY         35 

set  right  by  a  special  effort  of  the  imagination;  while  the  new 
view  has  this  great  advantage,  that  it  makes  room  for  all 
the  facts,  by  a  hypothesis,  suggested  not  by  one  difficulty, 
but  by  almost  all  the  discrepancies  and  difficulties  which  are 
encountered.  And,  after  all,  this  view  does  not  move  men 
away  from  the  central  truth  of  inspiration,  even  as  it  was 
conceived  by  the  last  generation.  Apart  from  any  care 
for  averting  errors  in  detail  which  can  be  ascribed  to 
Divine  wisdom  according  to  the  old  view  or  the  new, 
the  central  thing  in  both  surely  is  the  revelation  of  God 
Himself  It  was  always  God  that  was  held  to  be 
revealed,  and  this  the  advocates  of  the  newer  view 
insist  upon  most  strenuously.  They  hold  that  chosen 
men,  the  wisest,  best,  most  truthful  of  their  respective 
generations,  those  who  travailed  most  in  thought,  received 
exceptional  impressions  of  the  Divine  nature.  They 
saw  God,  and  their  whole  being  bore  the  impress  hence- 
forth of  this  illumination.  In  every  word  and  act  the 
light  they  had  received  found  expression  for  itself.  They 
did  not  receive  this  revelation  in  mere  propositions 
about  God,  which  had  to  be  carefully  repeated  with 
minute  verbal  accuracy.  They  saw,  and  their  natures 
were  in  their  degree  uplifted,  changed,  and  harmonised 
with  the  Divine.  They  could  no  more  be  false  in  speak- 
ing of  what  they  had  thus  experienced,  than  a  sincere 
and  tender  nature  can  be  false  in  speech  or  thought 
about  death,  when  it  once  has  found  its  love  frustrated 
and  overborne  by  that  dread  messenger  of  God,  The 
impression  in  both  cases  is  true  as  it  is  final,  and  it  will 
triumphantly  convey  itself  to  others  with  substantial  and 
effective  truth,  whatever  the  man's  knowledge  or  ignor- 
ance otherwise  may  be.  When  a  man  has  received  an 
impression,  or  a  sight  of  God  which  has  shaken  his  very 
soul,  will  it  be  lost  in  its  essential  parts  because  in  the 
speech   in   which   he    utters   it    he   shows   ignorance   of 


36  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

science,  or  accepts  as  simply  true  the  historic  knowledge 
of  his  day  ?  The  thing  is  impossible.  The  light  that 
is  within  him  must  shine  out,  even  though  the  medium 
through  which  it  shines  be  here  and  there  blackened 
by  imperfection.  In  the  fundamental  point,  therefore, 
the  old  school  of  critics  and  the  new  are  entirely  at 
one.  On  the  basis  of  this  essential  harmony  it  should 
be  possible  for  each  to  speak  to  the  other  for  edification. 
This  is  what  has  been  attempted  here  ;  and  if  those  who 
hold  by  the  Mosaic  authorship  of  Deuteronomy  will 
tolerate  the  opposite  view,  they  will  find  that  in  dealing 
with  the  Scriptures  as  a  revelation  of  God,  and  as  an 
infallible  guide  in  all  that  concerns  religious  and  moral 
truth,  there  is  no  difference.  To  make  the  sacred  word 
living  and  powerful  as  an  instrument  of  spiritual  regenera- 
tion is  our  common  effort ;  and  our  common  hope  must  be 
that,  if  in  anything  we  have  been  led  into  error,  the 
mistake  may  be  discovered  and  removed,  before  it  has 
wrought  evil  in  the  Church  of  God. 


CHAPTER    II 

THE   HISTORIC   SETTING    OF   DEUTERONOMY 

WHATEVER  may  be  the  date  of  the  first  publication 
of  Deuteronomy,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  it 
was  accepted  by  Josiah  and  the  people  of  his  time  with 
an  energy  and  thoroughness  of  which  we  find  no  previous 
example.  Its  main  lessons  were  learnt  and  put  into 
practice  by  them,  and  from  that  period  the  religious 
conceptions  of  Deuteronomy  dominated  and  formed  the 
Hebrew  mind  in  a  manner  of  which  we  have  no  earlier 
trace.  For  practical  purposes,  therefore,  we  may  say 
that  this  was  the  Deutcronomic  period.  The  book 
gathered  up  and  embodied  the  higher  strivings  of  that 
time ;  and  to  understand  it  thoroughly  we  need  to  know 
the  history  of  which  it  was,  in  part  at  least,  the  outcome 
Indeed,  on  any  supposition  as  to  age  and  authorship,  a 
study  of  the  history  of  Judah  from  the  end  of  the  eiglith 
century  B.C.  to  the  end  of  the  seventh  is  indispensable  if 
we  would  adequately  understand  our  book,  for  that  was 
the  time  when  the  book  is  seen  entering  as  a  living  force 
into  the  history  of  Israel. 

Unfortunatel}^,  however,  there  are  few  periods  of  Israelite 
history  as  to  which  we  have  less  of  reliable  information. 
During  much  of  the  period  the  main  currents  of  the 
national  life  ran  contrary  to  all  better  influences,  and  in 
such  epochs  the  compilers  of  the  Book  of  Kings  took  no 
interest.  For  the  most  part  they  were  content  to  "  look 
and    pass,"  gathering   up   the   results   of  such   times   of 

37 


38  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

declension  in  a  few  condemnatory  words.  It  is  only  when 
the  nation  is  on  the  upward  slope  that  they  enter  into 
details.  They  wrote  at  a  time  when  the  purpose  of  God 
in  their  national  life  was  becoming  clear,  and  the  splendour 
of  it  possessed  them  so  that  nothing  else  but  the  increase 
of  this  purpose  seemed  worthy  of  any  intenser  contempla- 
tion. Victories  and  defeats,  successes  and  failures,  and 
last  of  all  the  tremendous  catastrophe  of  the  Exile,  had 
taught  them  this  discernment ;  and  they  pressed  forward 
so  eagerly  to  record  the  deeds  and  thoughts  of  those  who 
had  learned  the  secret  of  Yahweh  that  they  had  eyes  for 
nothing  else.  Consequently  the  eighty  years  after  the 
fall  of  Samaria,  which  for  our  purpose  would  be  so 
extremely  instructive,  are  passed  over  in  all  our  sources, 
almost  without  mention.  But  there  are  some  facts  and 
events  of  which  we  can  be  entirely  sure ;  and  from  these 
it  is  possible  to  conceive  in  outline  the  way  in  which 
things  must  have  shaped  themselves  in  these  eventful 
years. 

Brought  about  as  it  had  been  by  the  appeal  of  Ahaz  to 
the  king  of  Assyria  for  help  against  the  continual  aggres- 
sions of  Syria  and  Israel,  the  fall  of  Samaria  must  have 
come  to  the  king  and  people  of  Judah  as  a  relief.  Their 
enemy  had  fallen,  and  they  would  henceforth  be  free  from 
the  anxiety  and  harassment  which  Israel's  enmity  had 
caused.  But  those  must  have  been  blind  indeed  with 
whom  this  feeling  was  permanent.  Very  soon  it  must 
have  become  apparent  to  all  thoughtful  m.en  in  Judah  that, 
if  they  had  been  freed  from  the  worrying  and  exasperating 
enmity  of  their  kindred,  their  very  success  had  brought 
them  into  the  presence  of  a  much  more  serious  foe.  With 
Assyria  on  their  immediate  frontier,  settled  in  the  lands 
both  of  Damascus  and  Samaria,  they  must  have  felt  them- 
selves exposed  to  chances  and  dangers  they  had  never 
hitherto  had  to  face.     Under  the  old  conditions,  except 


THE  HISTORIC  SETTING  OF  DEUTERONOMY         39 

during  comparatively  short  periods  when  there  was  actual 
war  between  the  two  kingdoms,  Israel  had  stood  between 
Judah  and  any  danger  from   the  North.     But  now  the 
people  of  the  Southern   Kingdom   were   summoned  from 
"the  safe  glad  rear  to    the    dreadful  van."     Henceforth 
no    patriot    could    fail   to    be   haunted   by   fear   of    that 
ambitious  and  conquering  Assyrian  nation.     The  whole  of 
Hezekiah's  reign  was  filled  with  more  or  less  convulsive 
efforts  to  maintain  the  independence  of  Judah.     These 
were  giving  but  faint  promise  of  success,  when  the  great 
deliverance  of  Jerusalem  foretold  by  Isaiah  gave  the  king  a 
breathing  space,  and  raised  the  highest  hopes  in  the  minds 
of  his  people.     It  seemed  for  a  little  quite  possible  that  the 
ancient  independence  of  Israel    might  be  restored.     To 
many  it  seemed  that  the  Messianic  times  were  at  hand  ; 
faith  in  Yahweh  carried  all  before  it.     But  Hezekiah  died 
not  long  after ;  and  in  the  succeeding  reigns  of  Manasseh 
and  Amon  the  whole  temper  and  policy  of  Israel  under- 
went a  most  serious  and  reactionary  change. 

The  causes  of  this  arc  not  far  to  seek.  During  the 
greater  part  of  Hezekiah's  reign  Isaiah  had  received  only 
moderate  support.  According  to  his  own  vision  of  his 
future  work,  he  was  to  preach  without  success ;  he  was  to 
say,  "  Hear  ye  indeed,  but  understand  not ;  and  see  ye, 
but  perceive  not " ;  and,  so  far  as  the  mass  of  the  people 
were  concerned,  that  prevision  was  justified.  Only  the 
astounding  success  with  which  his  opposition  to  the 
Assyrians  had  been  crowned  had  turned  the  tide  of 
popular  opinion  in  his  favour.  It  was  probably,  therefore, 
only  then  that  Hezekiah's  reforms  were  instituted.  They 
had  been  too  short  a  time  in  force  at  his  death  to  have 
sent  out  their  roots  into  the  national  life.  But  that  was 
not  all.  One  of  the  most  characteristic  points  in  all 
prophecy  was  that  the  time  when  the  full  Messianic  King- 
dom should  appear  was  never  clearly  defined.     Neither 


40  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  Prophet  nor  his  hearers  knew  when  it  would  be.     It 
loomed  always  as  a  bright  but  vague  background  to  the 
deliverance  which  lay  immediately  before   them ;  and  in 
almost  every  case  neither  speaker  nor  hearers  had   any 
conception  of  the  long  and  weary  way  which  divided  those 
sunlit   mountain   peaks    from  the   dark   and   threatening 
pass   which   they   were   approaching.      Now   the    literal 
interpretation  of  Isaiah's  prophecies  with  regard  to  the 
deliverance  from    Assyria   had    inevitably  led    the    mass 
of  the   people  to   believe   that   the   raising  of  the  siege 
of  Jerusalem  would  mean   the   immediate  destruction  of 
Assyria,  and  the  advent  of  the   Messianic  day  of  peace 
and   glory  for  Israel.     But  the  facts   completely  falsified 
that   expectation.     Instead    of   being    destroyed    Assyria 
only  grew  more  powerful,  and  instead  of  the  Messianic 
time    there    was    only  the    old    position    of   vassalage    to 
Assyria.     So  men  grew  weary,  and  said  then  as  they  have 
said  so  often  since,   "  All  things  are   as   they  have  been 
from    the    beginning,  and  where  is   the    promise    of   His 
coming  ?  "     The   true-hearted   said  it  with    sadness ;  and 
the    false-hearted,    saying  it    in    mockery   and    unbelief, 
fell    back  upon   the  old  heathenish  test,  and  said,   ''  The 
gods  of  Assyria  are  stronger  than  Yahweh,  and  we  must 
give  them  a  place  in  our  adoration."     With  the  bulk  of 
the  people  this  required  no  really  great  ehange  in  their 
point  of  view.     They  had  believed  in  Yahweh  and  agreed 
to  purify  His  worship,  because  He  had  proved  Himself 
stronger  than  Sennacherib  and  his  gods  ;  and  now  when, 
in  the  long  run,  Assyria  was  .triumphing,  they  must  have 
seemed  to  themselves  only  to  be  following  the  teachings 
of  experience  in  giving  the  host  of  heaven  equal  honour 
with   their  own  ancestral    God.     The  reaction,  therefore, 
was  more  in  the  outward   expression    than  in    principle, 
and  we  can  easily  understand  how  it  was  so  swift  and 
so   universal,     Manasseh^   Hezekiah's   son,  had   probably 


THE  HISTORIC  SETTING  OF  DEUTERONOMY         41 

opposed  his  father's  policy,  as  the  heir-apparent  has  so 
often  opposed  the  policy  of  the  reigning  monarch ;  and  if, 
as  many  suppose,  Hezekiah  lived  for  sixteen  years  after 
the  destruction  of  Sennacherib's  host,  Manasseh  came  to 
the  throne  just  when  men's  minds  were  most  weary  with 
hope  deferred,  and  when  the  Assyrian  success  was  about 
to  reach  its  highest  point  before  its  final  fall. 

Accordingly  Manasseh  would  seem  to  have  undone  at 
once  all  that  his  father  and  Isaiah  had  accomplished. 
Nay,  he  went  further  in  the  introduction  of  idolatry  than 
any  even  of  the  idolatrous  kings  who  had  preceded  him. 
In  the  Book  of  Kings  the  charges  made  against  him  are 
three: — ist,  that  he  introduced  the  worship  of  the  host 
of  heaven  according  to  the  Assyrian  ritual ;  2nd,  that  he 
took  part  in  the  Moloch-worship  ;  and  3rd,  that  he  restored 
the  old  semi-Canaanite  worship  which  it  had  been  Isaiah's 
most  strenuous  effort  to  root  out.  And  this  policy,  evil 
as  it  was  in  the  eyes  of  all  who  cared  for  the  higher 
destinies  of  Israel,  had  at  once  great  and  striking  external 
success.  For  it  meant  complete  submission  to  Assyria, 
a  willing  vassalage  from  which  even  the  wish  for  inde- 
pendence had  disappeared.  The  heart  of  the  old  Israelite 
independence  had  been  faith  in  Yahweh  and  confidence  in 
Israel's  calling  as  His  people.  Even  so  late  as  Isaiah's 
day  it  had  been  faith  in  Yahweh  which  had  kept  Hezekiah 
steady  in  his  opposition  to  apparently  overwhelming  force. 
But  now  Manasseh  and  the  people  who  supported  him 
exalted  the  gods  of  Assyria  as  an  even  surer  refuge  than 
Yahweh  had  been.  Having  made  that  admission,  there 
was  nothing  left  for  them  but  to  humble  themselves  under 
the  mighty  hand  of  the  great  king  and  his  great  gods. 
And  this  Israel  under  Manasseh  did  most  thoroughly. 
As  Stade  has  strikingly  said,  ''  The  Temple  of  the  one 
God  of  Israel  became  a  Pantheon."  The  feeble  attempts 
which  Ahaz  had  made  in  the  same  direction  were  utterly 


42  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

swept  out  of  men's  memory  by  the  completeness  of 
Manasseh's  apostasy.  With  this  degradation  of  the 
reHgious  faith  there  also  came,  naturally,  an  intellectual 
degradation.  Superstition,  baser  even  than  idolatry,  seized 
upon  the  minds  of  men,  and  illegitimate  efforts  to  pry 
into  the  future  or  to  influence  the  destinies  of  men  by 
magic  and  incantations  became  part  of  the  popular  fashion 
of  the  day.  The  old  religion  of  Israel  had  sternly  set 
itself  against  all  such  debasing  practices.  Alone  amid  the 
religions  of  the  ancient  world,  it  had  relentlessly  refused 
the  help  of  necromancy  and  magic  generally.  But  the 
barrier  the  religion  of  Yahweh  had  erected  fell  at  once 
when  its  purity  and  uniqueness  had  been  sacrificed,  and 
Manasseh  gave  himself  up  to  "  practise  augury  and  to  use 
enchantments,  and  to  deal  with  them  that  had  familiar 
spirits  and  with  wizards."  And  to  superstition  he  also 
added  cruelty.  Not  content  with  his  signal  victory  over 
all  the  best  impulses  of  the  past,  not  content  with  the 
applause  of  the  multitude  who  gladly  followed  him  to  do 
evil,  he  endeavoured  to  force  those  whose  work  he  had 
destroyed  to  bow  before  the  gods  they  both  hated  and 
despised.  We  know  too  little  of  the  circumstances  of  the 
time  to  be  sure  of  his  motives,  but  his  action  may  have 
been  founded  upon  a  craven  fear  that  if  he  did  not  suppress 
the  voices  of  those  who  spoke  for  freedom,  he  might  be 
visited  with  the  anger  of  the  Assyrian  king.  Or  it  may 
have  been  that  feeling,  so  powerfully  expressed  in  Brown- 
ing's poem  "  Instans  Tyrannus,"  which  makes  a  tyrant  feel 
that  all  his  life  is  made  bitter  to  him  if  there  remain 
within  his  power  one  free  man  whom  he  cannot  bend  to 
his  will.  In  any  case  it  is  certain  that  he  attacked  the 
prophetic  party  with  sanguinary  fury.  Though  he  had 
the  gods  of  the  great  battalions  on  his  side,  he  was  dimly 
afraid  of  the  power  of  ideas ;  and,  so  far  as  faithful  men 
were  concerned,  he  instituted  a  "  reign  of  terror,"     Accord- 


THE  HISTORIC  SETTING   OF  DEUTERONOMY         43 


ing  to  the  graphic  statement  of  the  historian,  "  he  filled 
Jerusalem  with  innocent  blood  from  tip  to  lip,"  and  for 
the  time  at  least  was  able  to  silence  righteousness  so  far 
as  public  utterance  was  concerned.  There  is  a  tradition 
that  even  Isaiah  fell  a  victim  to  his  fury,  being  sawn 
asunder  between  two  planks  at  his  command.  It  is 
perhaps  not  likely  that  Isaiah  had  survived  so  long.  But, 
beyond  all  doubt,  many  suffered  for  their  faithfulness  to 
God ;  and  it  seems  probable  that  the  wonderful  picture  of 
the  Suffering  Servant  in  the  Deutero-Isaiah  owes  much 
of  its  colour  to  the  pathetic  and  painful  memories  of  this 
evil  time. 

All  this  apostasy  brought  with  it  worldly  success. 
Manasseh  reigned  long,  and  under  him  the  land  had 
peace.  Assyria  cotild  have  no  quarrel  with  a  people  and 
a  king  who  anticipated  its  very  desire  by  eager  submis- 
sion. Peace  brought  material  prosperity.  The  land  was 
so  naturally  fertile  that  it  always  grew  rich  when  war  was 
kept  from  its  borders.  We  may  surmise,  too,  that  a  kind 
of  bastard  culture  became  popular  when  the  Jewish  mind 
had  opened  to  it,  for  good  and  evil,  a  world  of  myth  and 
song  and  legend  which,  if  known  before,  had  until  now 
been  barred  from  complete  and  triumphant  entrance  by 
faith  in  a  hving  God.  Once  only  would  Manasseh 
appear  to  have  asserted  himself,  and,  according  to  the 
Book  of  Chronicles,  he  was  taken  prisoner  in  Jerusalem 
by  the  master  he  had  served  so  well,  and  learned  to  know 
in  the  bitterness  of  a  Babylonian  prison  that  sycophancy 
does  not  always  lead  to  safety.  And  the  wisdom  he 
learned  went  further  even  than  that.  At  the  end  of  his 
life  he  appears  to  have  wished  to  undo,  at  least  in  some 
measure,  the  evil  he  had  laboured  throughout  his  reign  to 
establish  and  make  strong.  But  he  found  that  to  be 
impossible  ;  and  if  his  repentance  was  deep  and  sincere  he 
must  have  learned  how  severely  the  heavenly  powers  can 


44  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


punish,  by  opening  a  man's  eyes  to  the  evil  he  has  done 
when  it  cannot  be  undone.  Nor  did  his  late  repentance 
affect  his  son,  for  under  Amon  all  things  continued  in 
their  previous  evil  course.  Indeed  the  prevailing  idolatry 
had  rooted  itself  so  firmly  that  even  in  the  early  years  of 
Josiah,  when  the  prophetic  influence  was  beginning  to 
reappear,  it  still  retained  its  hold  with  unshaken  power. 

But  what  of  the  prophetic  party  during  those  evil  days  ? 
Precipitated  from  power  in  an  instant  at  Hezekiah's 
death,  it  had  at  once  become  feeble  and  obscure.  Its 
leading  supporters,  we  may  well  believe,  had  to  seek 
safety  in  hiding  or  in  flight ;  and  after  some  of  its  chief 
speakers  had  been  cut  off,  the  once  dominant  party  had 
to  take  the  position  of  persecuted  remnants  for  whom  all 
public  work  was  impossible.  Under  such  circumstances 
what  could  these  faithful  men  do?  They  could  only 
wait  and  pray,  and  prepare  for  that  better  day  of  whose 
return  their  faith  in  Yahweh  would  not  suffer  them  to 
despair. 

From  the  position  afterwards  taken  up  by  the  high 
priest,  it  would  seem  probable  that  the  Temple  clergy 
were  in  full  sympathy  with  the  prophetic  movement.  We 
need  not  suppose  that  that  sympathy  arose  wholly  from 
the  tendency  of  prophetic  thought  and  effort  towards  the 
suppression  of  the  High  Places.  We  should  probably  do 
the  better  spirits  among  the  priesthood  grievous  wrong 
if  we  thought  that  their  personal  interest  was  their  main 
motive  in  supporting  even  that  reform.  Notwithstanding 
the  earlier  prophets'  denunciation  of  the  priests  as  a 
class,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  they  had  advanced, 
with  the  better  classes  of  their  nation  generally,  in  their 
appreciation  of  spiritual  religion.  And  we  may  well 
believe  that  the  sight  of  the  havoc  which  the  now  degraded 
worship  at  the  High  Places  was  working  in  the  popular 
mind  made  them  earnest  in  their  endeavours  to  restore 


THE  HISTORIC  SETTING   OF  DEUTERONOMY         45 

the  true  faith.  Privileged  as  they  were,  they  would 
naturally  be  sheltered  from  the  full  fury  of  the  persecu- 
tion. Consequently,  when  the  time  came  for  the 
supporters  of  true  religion  to  take  their  place  in  public 
life  again,  it  was  natural  and  inevitable  that  the  priests 
should  be  at  their  head.  The  fact,  too,  that  Josiah  at 
his  accession  was  a  child,  for  whose  guardian  no  fitter 
person  could  be  found  than  the  chief  priest,  gave  the 
future  into  their  hands.  But  they  did  not  move  pre- 
maturely. So  long  as  Josiah  was  a  minor  they  contented 
themselves  with  instilling  their  principles  into  the  mind 
of  the  king.  In  outward  political  life,  so  far  as  v/e  can 
ascertain,  they  did  not  interfere  at  all,  and  the  ground  was 
moved  away  from  beneath  the  feet  of  the  idolatrous  party, 
while  they  thought  themselves  firmly  established.  In 
Josiah's  eighteenth  year  the  results  of  this  quiet  prepara- 
tion appeared.  In  that  year  Hilkiah,  the  high  priest,  told 
Shaphan  the  scribe  that  he  had  found  "the  Book  of  the 
Law "  in  the  Temple.  That  this  was  Deuteronomy,  if 
not  altogether,  yet  practically,  as  we  have  it  now,  there 
can  be  but  little  doubt ;  and  it  immediately  became  the 
text-book  of  religion  for  all  that  remained  of  Israel. 

Now  it  is  obvious  that  the  whole  hopes  of  the  religious 
party  would  naturally  be  fixed  upon  it.  They  would 
turn  to  it  as  eagerly  as  the  Reformers  turned  to  the  Bible, 
after  it  had  been  rediscovered  by  Luther  at  Erfurt. 
For  obviously,  if  the  people  could  be  got  to  acknowledge 
the  law,  the  axe  would  be  laid  at  the  root  of  every  evil 
which  they  deplored.  The  High  Places  would  be  de- 
stroyed ;  the  primacy  of  the  Temple  at  Jerusalem  would 
be  secured  ;  and  the  prophetic  teaching,  with  its  insistence 
upon  judgment  and  the  love  of  God  as  the  essentials  of 
true  worship,  would,  for  the  first  time,  become  the 
dominant  influence  in  civil  and  religious  life.  Never  since 
Israel  was  a  nation  had  the  condition  of  the  people  called 


46  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

so  loudly  for  the  enforcement  of  such  a  law,  and  now  for 
the  first  time  was  there  hope  that  it  might  be  actually 
enforced.  The  character  of  the  evils  that  afflicted  the 
nation,  the  history  of  the  last  half-century,  and  the 
teachings  of  the  great  canonical  prophets  had  all  con- 
verged, as  it  were,  to  this  one  point,  and  we  can  understand 
how  all  who  strove  for  the  higher  life  of  Israel  would 
strive  that  Deuteronomy,  whether  ancient  or  modern, 
should  be  neglected  no  longer.  The  result  was  that  the 
whole  power  of  the  State  was  thrown  into  the  struggle 
against  idolatry  and  the  half-heathen  Bamoth-worship. 
The  prophets  and  the  priests  joined  hands  to  spread  the 
principles  of  the  true  religion,  as  voiced  by  Deuteronomy. 
Professor  Cheyne,  in  his  Jeremiah,  conjectures,  with 
considerable  likelihood,  that  the  break  in  that  prophet's 
activity  which  occurred  at  this  time  is  to  be  accounted  for 
by  the  zeal  with  which  he  devoted  himself  to  Deuteronomic 
propaganda  throughout  the  land.  In  any  case,  for  the 
moment  the  purer  worship  obtained  a  completer  victory 
than  ever  before.  Unfortunately  it  came  too  late  and 
proved  too  evanescent.  But  in  the  inward  sphere,  the 
Deuteronomic  view  of  religion  as  having  its  centre  in  love 
to  God,  the  tender,  thoughtful  evangelical  spirit  which 
distinguishes  the  whole  outlook  of  its  author,  laid  hold 
upon  all  the  higher  minds  that  came  after  it.  To 
Jeremiah  and  to  St.  Paul  alike,  it,  par  excellence,  represented 
the  law  of  God.  Produced,  or  at  any  rate  first  prized,  at 
a  time  when  Israel  had  fallen  very  low,  when  evil  was 
triumphant  and  good  persecuted,  it  recommended  and 
exemplified  a  cheerful  courage,  born  of  faith  in  the  high 
destiny  of  Israel  and  the  truth  of  God.  That,  more  than 
anything  else,  helped  to  bear  the  ark  of  the  Church  over 
the  tumultuous  centuries  which  separated  those  two  great 
servants  of  God,  and  when  Christ  appeared  it  was  seen 
that  this  book,  more  than  any  in  the  Old  Testament  save 


THE  HISTORIC  SETTING  OF  DEUTERONOM\  47 

perhaps  the  Psalms,  had  anticipated  His  cardinal  teachings 
regarding  the  attitude  of  man  to  God  and  of  man  to  man. 
The  conflicts  and  needs  of  the  seventh  century  B.C.,  which 
are  so  clearly  reflected  in  it,  gave  inspiration  the  oppor- 
tunity it  needed  to  reveal  that  inner  secret  of  God's 
Kingdom.  Out  of  defeat  and  disaster  this  revelation 
came,  and  through  times  of  defeat  and  backsliding  it 
proved  its  Divine  origin  by  keeping  steadfast  and  calm 
those  who  specially  waited  for  the  coming  of  the  Messiah. 


CHAPTER    III 

THE  DIVINE  GOVERNMENT 
Deut.  i.-iii. 

AFTER  these  preliminary  discussions  we  now  enter 
upon  the  exposition.  With  the  exception  of  the 
first  two  verses  of  chapter  i.,  concerning  which  there 
is  a  doubt  whether  they  do  not  belong  to  Numbers, 
these  three  chapters  stand  out  as  the  first  section  of  oui 
book.  Examination  shows  that  they  form  a  separate  and 
distinct  whole,  not  continued  in  chapter  iv. ;  but  there  has 
been  a  great  diversity  of  opinion  as  to  their  authorship 
and  the  intention  with  which  they  have  been  placed  here. 
The  vocabulary  and  the  style  so  resemble  those  of  the 
main  parts  of  the  book,  that  they  cannot  be  entirely 
separated  from  them  ;  yet,  at  the  same  time,  it  seems 
unlikely  that  the  original  author  of  the  main  trunk  of 
Deuteronomy  can  have  begun  his  book  with  this  intro- 
ductory speech  from  Moses,  followed  it  up  with  another 
Mosaic  speech,  still  introductory,  in  chapter  iv.,  and  in 
chapter  v.  begun  yet  another  introductory  speech  running 
through  seven  chapters,  before  he  comes  to  the  statutes 
and  judgments  which  are  announced  at  the  very  beginning. 
The  current  supposition  about  these  chapters,  therefore,  is 
that  they  are  the  work  of  a  Deuteronomist,  a  man  formed 
under  the  influence  of  Deuteronomy  and  filled  with  its 
spirit,  but  not  the  author  of  the  book.  This  seems  to 
account  for  the  resemblances,  and  would  also  explain  to 

48 


i.-iii.]  THE  DIVINE  GOVERNMENT  49 

some  extent  the  existence  of  such  a  superfluous  prologue. 
But   the    hypothesis    is,   nevertheless,  not  entirely  satis- 
factory.    The  resemblances  are   closer   than   we   should 
expect  in  the  work  of  different  authors ;  and  one  feels  that 
the  supposed  Deuteronomist  must  have  been  less  sensitive 
in  a  literary  sense  than  we  have  any  right  to  suppose  him 
if  he  did  not  feel  the  incongruity  of  such  a  speech  in  this 
place.    Professor  Dillmann  has  made  a  very  acute  sugges- 
tion, which  meets  the  whole  difficulty  in  a  more  natural  way. 
Feeling  that  the  style  and  language  were  in  all  essentials 
one  with  those  of  the  central  Deuteronomy,  he  seeks  for 
some  explanation  which  would  permit  him  to  assign  this 
section  to  the  author  of  the  book  himself.     He  suggests 
that  as  originally  written  this  was  a  historical  introduction 
leading  up  to  the  central  code  of  laws  ;  a  historical  preface 
in  fact,  which  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  naturally  pre- 
fixed to  his  book.     Ex  hypothcsi  he  had  not  the  previous 
books,  Exodus,  Leviticus,  and  Numbers,  before  him  as  we 
have  them.     These  now  form  a  historical  introduction  to 
Deuteronomy  of  a  very  minute  and   elaborate  kind  ;  but 
he  had  to  embody  in  his  own  book  all  of  the  past  history 
of  his  people  that  he  wished  to  emphasise.     But  when  the 
editor  who  arranged  the  Pentateuch  as  we  now  have  it 
inserted  Deuteronomy  in  its  present  place,  he  found  that 
he  had  a  double  historical  preface,  that  in  the  previous 
books  and  this  in  Deuteronomy  itself.     As  reverence  for- 
bade the  rejection  of  these  chapters,  he  took  refuge  in  the 
expedient  of  turning  the   originally  impersonal   narrative 
into  a  speech  of  Moses;  which   he  could   all  the   more 
blamelessly  do  as  the  probabiHty  is  that  the  whole  book 
was  regarded  in   his  time  as  the  work  of  Moses.     This 
hypothesis,  if  it  can  be  accepted,  certainly  accounts  for  all 
the  phenomena  presented  by  these  chapters— the  similarity 
of  language,  the   archaeological  notes  in  the  speech,  and 
the  historic  colour  in  the  statements  regarding  Edom,  for 

4 


50  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

example,  which  corresponds  to  early  feeling,  not  to  post- 
exilic  thought  at  all.  It  has  besides  the  merit  of  reducing 
the  number  of  anonymous  writers  to  be  taken  account  ot 
in  the  Pentateuch,  a  most  desirable  thing  in  itself  Lastly, 
it  gives  us  in  Deuteronomy  a  compact  whole  more  complete 
in  all  its  parts  than  almost  any  other  portion  of  the  Old 
Testament,  certainly  more  so  than  any  of  the  books 
containing  legislation. 

Moreover,  that  the  Deuteronomic  reinforcement  and 
expansion  of  the  Mosaic  le^islatioa,.  as  contained  in  the 
Book  of  the  Covenant,  ^hould  begin  with  such  a  history  of 
Yahweh's  dealings  with  His  people,  is  entirely  characteristic 
of  Old  Testament  Revelation.  In  the  main  and  primarily, 
what  the  Old  Testament  writers  give  us  is  a  history  of 
how  God  wrought,  how  He  dealt  with  the  people  He  had 
chosen.  In  the  view  of  the  Hebrew  writers,  God's  first 
and  main  revelation  of  Himself  is  always  in  conduct.  He 
showed  Himself  good  and  merciful  and  gentle  to  His 
people,  and  then,  having  so  shown  Himself,  He  has  an 
acknowledged  right  to  claim  their  obedience.  As  St.  Paul 
has  so  powerfully  pointed  out,  the  law  was  secondary,  not 
primary.  Grace,  the  free  love  and  choice  of  God,  was 
always  the  beginning  of  true  relations  with  Him,  and  only 
after  that  had  been  known  and  accepted  does  He  look  for 
the  true  life  which  His  law  is  to  regulate.  Naturally, 
therefore,  when  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  is  about  to 
press  upon  Israel  the  law  in  its  expanded  form,  to  call 
them  back  from  many  aberrations,  to  summon  them  to  a 
reformation  and  new  establishment  of  the  whole  frame- 
work of  their  lives,  he  turns  back  to  remind  them  of  what 
their  past  had  been.  Law,  therefore,  is  only  a  secondary 
deposit  of  Revelation.  If  we  are  true  to  the  Biblical  point 
of  view  we  shall  not  look  for  the  Divine  voice  only,  or  even 
chiefly,  in  the  legal  portions  of  the  Scripture.  God's  full 
revelation  of  Himself  will  be  seen  in  the  process  and  the 


i.-iii.]  THE  DIVINE  GOVERNMENT  51 

completion  of  that  age-long  movement,  which  was  begun 
when  Israel  first  became  a  nation  by  receiving  Yahweh 
as  their  God,  and  which  ended  with  the  Hfe  and  death 
of  Him  who  summed  up  in  Himself  all  that  Israel  was 
called,  but  failed,  to  be. 

That  is  the  ruling  thought  in  Scripture  about  Reve- 
lation. God  reveals  Himself  in  history ;  and  by  the 
persistent  thoroughness  with  which  the  Scriptural  writers 
grasp  this  thought,  the  unique  and  effective  character  of 
the  Biblical  Revelation  is  largely  accounted  for.  Other 
nations,  no  doubt,  looked  back  at  times  upon  what  their 
gods  had  done  for  them,  and  those  who  spoke  for  these 
gods  may  often  have  claimed  obedience  and  service  from 
their  people  on  the  ground  of  past  favour  and  under 
threats  of  its  withdrawal.  But  earlier  than  any  other 
people  which  has  affected  the  higher  races  of  mankind, 
Israel  conceived  of  God  as  a  moral  power  with  a  will  and 
purpose  which  embraced  mankind.  Further,  in  the  belief 
which  appears  in  their  earliest  records,  that  through  them 
the  nations  were  to  be  blessed,  and  that  in  the  future 
One  was  coming  who  would  in  Himself  bring  about  the 
realisation  of  Israel's  destiny,  they  were  provided  with  a 
philosophy  of  history,  with  a  conception  which  was  fitted 
to  draw  into  organic  connection  with  itself  all  the  various 
fortunes  of  Israel  and  of  the  nations. 

Of  course,  at  first  much  that  was  involved  in  their 
view  was  not  present  to  any  mind.  It  was  the  very 
merit  of  the  germinal  revelation  made  through  Moses 
that  it  had  in  it  powers  of  growth  and  expansion.  In 
no  other  way  could  it  be  a  true  revelation  of  God,  a 
revelation  which  should  have  in  it  the  fulness,  the  flexi- 
bility, the  aloofness  from  mere  local  and  temporary 
peculiarities,  which  would  secure  its  fitness  for  universal 
mankind.  Any  revelation  that  consists  only  of  words,  of 
ideas  even,  must,  to  be  received,  have  som.e  kind  of  relation 


52  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


to  the  minds  that  are  to  receive  it.  If  the  words  and 
ideas  are  revealed,  as  they  must  be,  at  a  given  place  and 
a  given  time,  they  must  be  in  such  a  relation  to  that 
place  and  time  that  at;  some  period  ot  the  world's  history 
they  will  be  found  inadequate,  needing  expansion,  which 
does  not  come  naturally,  and  then  they  have  to  be  laid 
aside  as  insufficient.  But  a  revelation  which  consists  in 
acts,  which  reveals  God  in  intimate,  age-long,  constant 
dealings  with  mankind,  is  so  many-sided,  so  varied,  so 
closely  moulded  to  the  actual  and  universal  needs  of  man, 
that  it  embraces  all  the  fundamental  exigencies  of  human 
life,  and  must  always  continue  to  cover  human  experience. 
From  it  men  may  draw  off  systems  of  doctrines,  which 
may  concentrate  the  revelation  for  a  particular  generation, 
or  for  a  series  of  generations,  and  make  it  more  potently 
active  in  these  circumstances.  But  unless  the  system  be 
kept  constantly  in  touch  with  the  revelation  as  given  in 
the  history,  it  must  become  inadequate,  false  in  part,  and 
must  one  day  vanish  away. 
u^The  revelation  then  in  life  is  the  only  possible  form 
for  a  real  revelation  of  God ;  and  that  the  writers  of 
the  Old  Testament  in  their  circumstances  and  in  their 
time  felt  and  asserted  this,  is  in  itself  so  very  great  a 
merit,  that  it  is  almost  of  itself  sufficient  to  justify  any 
claims  they  may  make  to  special  inspiration.  The  greatest 
of  them  saw  God  at  work  in  the  world,  and  had  experience 
of  His  influence  in  themselves,  so  that  they  had  their 
eyes  opened  to  His  actions  as  other  men  had  not.  The 
least  of  them,  again,  had  been  placed  at  the  true  point  of 
view  for  estimating  aright  the  significance  of  the  ordinary 
action  of  the  Divine  Providence,  and  for  tracing  the  lines 
of  Divine  action  where  they  were  to  other  men  invisible, 
or  at  least  obscure.  And  in  the  records  they  have  left  us 
they  have  been  entirely  true  to  that  supremely  important 
point  of  view.     All  they  deal  with  in  the  history  is  the 


i.-iii.]  THE  DIVINE   GOVERNMENT  53 

moral  and  spiritual  effects  of  God's  dealing ;  and  the 
great  interests,  as  the  world  reckons  them,  of  war  and 
conquest,  of  commerce  and  art,  are  referred  to  only  briefly 
and  often  only  in  the  way  of  allusion.  To  many  moderns 
this  is  an  offence,  which  they  avenge  by  speaking  con- 
temptuously of  the  mental  endowment  of  the  Biblical 
writers  as  historians.  On  the  contrary,  that  these  should 
have  kept  their  eyes  fixed  only  upon  that  which  concerned 
the  religious  life  of  their  people,  that  they  should  have 
kept  firm  hold  of  the  truth  that  it  was  there  the  central 
importance  of  the  people  lay,  and  that  they  have  given  us 
the  material  for  the  formation  of  that  great  conception  of 
supernatural  revelation  by  history  in  which  God  Himself 
moves  as  a  factor,  is  a  merit  so  great  that  even  if  it  were 
only  a  brilHant  fancy  they  might  surely  be  pardoned  for 
ignoring  other  things.  But  if,  as  is  the  truth,  they  were 
tracing  the  central  stream  of  God's  redemptive  action  in 
the  world,  were  laying  open  to  our  view  the  steps  by 
which  the  unapproachably  lofty  conception  of  God  was 
built  up,  which  their  nation  alone  has  won  for  the  human 
race,  then  it  can  hardly  seem  a  fault  that  nothing  else 
appealed  to  them.  They  have  given  God  to  those  who 
were  bhndly  groping  for  Him,  and  they  have  established 
the  standard  by  which  all  historic  estimates  of  even 
modern  Ufe  are  ultimately  to  be  measured. 

For  though  there  were  in  the  history  of  that  particular 
nation,  and  in  the  line  of  preparation  for  Christ,  special 
miraculous  manifestations  of  God's  power  and  love,  which 
do  not  now  occur,  yet  no  judgment  of  the  course  of 
history  is  worth  anything,  even  to-day,  which  does  not 
occupy  essentially  the  Biblical  position.  Ultimately  the 
thing  to  be  considered  is,  what  hath  God  wrought  ?  If 
that  be  ignored,  then  the  stable  and  instructive  element 
in  history  has  been  kept  out  of  sight,  and  the  mind  loses 
itself  hopelessly  amid  the  weltering  chaos  of  second  causes. 


54  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Froude,  in  his  History  of  England y  has  noted  this,  and 
declares  that  in  the  period  he  deals  with  it  was  the 
religious  men  who  alone  had  any  true  insight  into  the 
tendency  of  things.  They  measured  all  things,  almost 
too  crudely,  by  the  Biblical  standard ;  but  so  essentially 
true  and  fundamental  does  that  show  itself  to  be,  that 
their  judgment  so  formed  has  proved  to  be  the  only  sound 
one.  This  is  what  we  should  expect  if  God's  power  and 
righteousness  are  the  great  factors  in  the  drama  which 
the  history  of  man  and  of  the  world  unfolds  to  us.  That 
being  so,  the  suicidal  folly  of  the  policy  of  any  Church 
or  party  which  shuts  the  Bible  away  from  popular  use 
is  manifest.  It  is  nothing  short  of  a  blinding  of  the 
people's  eyes,  and  a  shutting  of  their  ears  to  warning 
voices  which  the  providential  government  of  the  world, 
when  viewed  on  a  large  scale,  never  fails  to  utter.  It 
renders  sound  political  judgment  the  prerogative  only  of 
the  few,  and  sets  them  among  a  people  who  will  turn  to 
any  charlatans  rather  than  believe  their  voice. 

It  was  natural  and  it  was  inevitable,  therefore,  that 
the  author  of  Deuteronomy,  standing,  as  he  did,  on  the 
threshold  of  a  great  crisis  in  the  history  of  Israel,  should 
turn  the  thoughts  of  his  people  back  to  the  history  of  the 
past.  To  him  the  great  figure  in  the  history  of  Israel 
in  those  trying  and  eventful  years  during  which  they 
wandered  between  Horeb,  Kadesh-Barnea,  and  the  country 
of  the  Arnon,  is  Yahweh  their  God.  He  is  behind  all  their 
movements,  impelling  and  inciting  them  to  go  on  and 
enjoy  the  good  land  He  had  promised  to  their  fathers. 
He  went  before  them  and  fought  for  them.  He  bare 
them  in  the  wilderness,  as  a  man  doth  bear  his  son.  He 
watched  over  them  and  guided  their  footsteps  in  cloud 
and  fire  by  day  and  night.  Moreover  all  the  nations  by 
whom  they  passed  had  been  led  by  Him  and  assigned 
their  places,  and  only  those  nations  whom  Yahweh  chose 


i.-iii.]  THE  DIVINE  GOVERNMENT  55 

had  been  given  into  Israel's  hand.  In  the  internal  affairs 
of  the  community,  too,  He  had  asserted  Himself.  They 
were  Yahweh's  people,  and  all  their  national  action  was 
to  be  according  to  His  righteous  character.  Especially 
was  the  administration  of  justice  to  be  pure  and  impartial, 
yielding  to  neither  fear  nor  favour  because  the  ''judgment 
is  God's."  And  how  had  they  responded  to  all  this  loving 
favour  on  the  part  of  God  ?  At  the  first  hint  of  serious 
conflict  they  shrank  back  in  fear.  Notwithstanding  that 
the  land  which  God  had  given  them  was  a  good  and  fruit- 
ful country,  and  notwithstanding  the  promises  of  Divine 
help,  they  refused  to  incur  the  necessary  toils  and  risks 
of  the  conquest.  Every  difficulty  they  might  encounter 
was  exaggerated  by  them ;  their  very  deliverance  from 
Egypt,  which  they  had  been  wont  to  consider  "their 
crowning  mercy,"  became  to  their  faithless  cowardice  an 
evidence  of  hatred  for  them  on  the  part  of  God. 

To  men  in  such  a  state  of  mind  conquest  was  impossible  ; 
and  though,  in  a  spasmodic  revulsion  from  their  abject 
cowardice,  they  made  an  attack  upon  the  people  they 
were  to  dispossess,  it  ended,  as  it  could  not  but  end,  in 
their  defeat  and  rout.  They  were  condemned  to  forty 
years  of  wandering,  and  it  was  only  after  all  that  genera- 
tion was  dead  that  Israel  was  again  permitted  to  approach 
the  land  of  promise.  But  Yahweh  had  been  faithful  to 
them,  and  when  the  time  was  come  He  opened  the  way 
for  their  advance  and  gave  them  the  victory  and  the  land. 
For  His  love  was  patient,  and  always  made  a  way  to  bless 
them,  even  through  their  sins. 

That  was  the  picture  the  Deuteronomist  spread  out 
before  the  eyes  of  his  countrymen,  to  the  intent  that  they 
might  know  the  love  of  God,  and  might  see  that  safety 
lay  for  them  in  a  willing  yielding  of  themselves  to  that 
love.  The  disastrous  results  of  their  wayward  and 
faint-hearted   shrinking  from   this   Divine   calling   is   the 


56  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

only  direct  threat  he  uses  but  in  the  passage  there  is 
another  warning,  all  the  more  impressive  that  it  is  vague 
and  shadow3^  God  is  to  the  Deuteronomist  the  universal 
ruler  of  the  world.  The  nations  are  raised  up  and  cast 
down  according  to  His  will,  and  until  He  wills  it  they 
cannot  be  dispossessed.  But  He  had  willed  that  fate  for 
many,  and  at  every  step  of  Israel's  progress  they  come 
upon  traces  of  vanished  peoples  whom  for  their  sins  He 
had  suffered  others  to  destroy.  The  Emim  in  Moab, 
the  Zamzummim  in  Ammon,  the  Horites  in  Seir,  and  the 
Avvims  in  Philistia,  had  all  been  destroyed  before  the 
people  who  now  occupied  these  lands,  and  the  whole 
background  of  the  narrative  is  one  of  judgment,  where 
mercy  had  been  of  no  avail.  The  sword  of  the  Lord  is 
dimly  seen  in  the  archaeological  notes  which  are  so 
frequent  in  this  section  of  our  book  and  thus  the  final 
touch  is  given  to  the  picture  of  the  past  which  is  here 
drawn  to  be  an  impulse  for  the  future.  While  all  the 
foreground  represents  only  God's  love  and  patience  over- 
coming man's  rebellion,  the  background  is,  like  the  path 
of  the  great  pilgrim  caravans  which  year  by  year  make 
their  slow  and  toilsome  way  to  Mohammedan  holy  places, 
strewn  with  the  remains  of  predecessors  in  the  same  path. 
With  stern,  menacing  finger  this  great  teacher  of  Israel 
points  to  these  evidences  that  the  Divine  love  and  patience 
may  be,  and  have  been,  outworn,  and  seems  to  re-echo 
in  an  even  more  impressive  way  the  language  of  Isaiah : 
'^The  anger  of  Yahweh  was  kindled  (against  these  peoples), 
and  He  stretched  forth  His  hand  (against  them)  and  smote 
(them) ;  and  the  hills  did  tremble,  and  (their)  carcases 
were  as  refuse  in  the  midst  of  the  streets.  For  all  this 
His  anger  is  not  turned  away,  but  His  hand  is  stretched 
out  still."  Without  a  word  of  direct  rebuke  he  opens 
his  people's  eyes  to  see  that  shadowy  outstretched  hand. 
Behind  all  the  turmoil  of  the  world  there  is  a  presence 


i.-iii.]  THE  DIVINE  GOVERNMENT  57 

and  a  power  which  supports  all  who  seek  good,  but  which 
is  sternly  set  against  all  evil,  ready,  when  the  moment 
comes,  "  to  strike  once  and  strike  no  more." 

Yet  another  glimpse  is  given  us  in  these  chapters  ot 
God's  manner  of  dealing  with  men.  We  have  seen  how 
He  guides  and  rules  His  chosen  ones.  We  have  seen 
how  He  punishes  those  who  have  set  themselves  against 
the  Divine  law.  And  in  chapter  ii.  30  we  are  told  how 
men  become  hardened  in  their  sin,  so  as  to  render 
destruction  inevitable.  Of  Sihon,  king  of  Heshbon,  who 
would  not  let  the  Israelites  pass  by  him,  the  writer  says : 
^*  Yahweh  thy  God  hardened  his  spirit,  and  made  his 
heart  obstinate,  that  He  might  deliver  him  into  thy  hand, 
as  appeareth  this  day."  But  he  does  not  mean  by  these 
expressions  to  lay  upon  God  the  causation  of  Sihon 's 
obstinacy,  so  as  to  make  the  man  a  mere  helpless  victim. 
His  thought  rather  is,  that  as  God  rules  all,  so  to  Him 
must  be  ultimately  traced  all  that  happens  in  the  world. 
In  some  sense  all  acts,  whether  good  or  bad,  all  agencies, 
whether  beneficent  or  destructive,  have  their  source  in 
and  their  power  from  Him.  But  nevertheless  men  have 
moral  responsibility  for  their  acts,  and  are  fully  and  justly 
conscious  of  ill  desert.  Consequently  that  hardening  oi 
spirit  or  of  heart,  which  at  one  moment  may  be  attributed 
solely  to  God,  may  at  another  be  ascribed  solely  to  the 
evil  determination  of  man.  The  most  instructive  instance 
of  this  is  to  be  found  in  the  history  of  Pharaoh,  when  he 
was  commanded  to  let  Israel  go.  In  that  narrative,  from 
Exodus  iv.  to  xi.,  there  is  repeated  interchange  of  expres- 
sion. Now  it  is  Yahweh  hardened  Pharaoh's  heart ;  now, 
as  in  viii.  15  and  32,  Pharaoh  hardened  his  own  heart; 
and,  again,  Pharaoh's  heart  was  hardened.  In  each  case 
the  same  thing  is  meant,  and  the  varying  expressions 
correspond  only  to  a  difference  of  standpoint.  When 
Yahweh  foretells  that  the  signs  He  authorises  Moses  to 


58  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

show  will  fail  of  their  effect,  it  is  always  "  Yahweh  will 
harden  Pharaoh's  heart/'  since  the  main  point  in  contem- 
plation is  His  government  of  the  world.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  it  is  the  sinful  obstinacy  of  Pharaoh  which  is 
prominent  in  the  passage,  we  have  the  self-determination 
of  Pharaoh  alone  set  before  us.  But  it  is  to  be  noted, 
and  this  is  indeed  the  cardinal  fact,  that  Yahweh  never 
is  said  to  harden  the  heart  of  a  good  man,  or  a  man  set 
mainly  upon  righteousness.  It  is  always  those  who  are 
guilty  of  palpable  wrongs  and  acts  of  evil-doing  upon 
whom  God  thus  works. 

Now  we  know  that  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  had  two 
at  least  of  the  ancient  historical  narratives  before  him 
which  are  combined  in  Exod.  iv. — xi.,  and  he  takes  up  their 
thinking.  Expressed  in  modern  language,  the  thought  is 
this.  When  men  are  found  following  their  own  will  in 
defiance  of  all  law  and  all  the  restraints  of  righteousness, 
that  is  manifestly  not  the  first  stage  in  their  moral  de- 
clension. This  obstinacy  in  evil  is  the  result  and  the 
wages  of  former  evil  deeds,  beginning  perhaps  only  with 
careless  laxity,  but  gathering  strength  and  virulence  with 
every  wilful  sin.  Until  near  the  end  of  a  completed  growth 
in  wickedness  no  man  deliberately  says,  "  Evil,  be  thou 
my  good."  Nevertheless  each  act  of  sin  involves  a  step 
towards  that,  and  the  sinner  in  this  manner  hardens 
himself  against  all  warning.  Like  the  sins  which  work 
this  obduracy,  this  hardening  is  the  sinner's  own  act. 
The  ruin  which  falls  upon  his  moral  nature  is  his  own 
work.  That  is  the  inexorable  result  of  the  moral  order  of 
the  universe,  and  from  it  no  exception  is  possible.  But 
if  so,  God  too  has  been  active  in  all  such  catastrophes. 
He  has  so  framed  and  ordered  the  world  that  indulgence 
in  evil  must  harden  in  evil.  This  it  was  which  the 
Israelite  religious  mind  saw  and  dwelt  upon,  as  well  as 
upon  man's  share  in  the  dread  process  of  moral  decay. 


i.-iii.]  THE  DIVINE  GOVERNMENT  59 

We  also  do  well  to  take  heed  to  this  aspect  of  the  truth. 
When  we  do,  we  have  solved  the  Scriptural  difficulty 
regarding  the  Divine  hardening  of  man's  heart.  It  is 
simply  the  ancient  formula  for  what  every  mind  that  is 
ethically  trained  recognises  in  the  world  to-day.  Those 
who  recognise  themselves  as  children  of  God,  and  acknow- 
ledge the  obligations  of  His  law,  are  dealt  with  in  the 
way  of  discipline  with  infinite  love  and  patience.  Those 
who  definitely  set  themselves  against  the  moral  order  of 
the  world  which  God  has  established  are  broken  in  pieces 
and  destroyed.  Between  these  two  classes  there  are  the 
morally  undetermined,  who  ultimately  turn  either  to  the 
right  hand  or  to  the  left.  The  process  by  which  these 
pass  on  to  be  numbered  among  the  rebellious  is  pictured 
in  Scripture  with  extraordinary  moral  insight.  The  only 
difference  from  a  present-day  description  of  it  is,  that  here 
God  is  kept  constantly  present  to  the  mind  as  the  chief 
factor  in  the  development  of  the  soul.  To-day,  even  those 
who  believe  in  God  are  apt  to  forget  Him  in  tracing  His 
laws  of  action.  But  that  is  an  error  of  the  first  magnitude. 
It  darkens  the  hope  of  man ;  for  without  a  sure  promise  of 
Divine  help  there  is  no  certainty  of  moral  victory  either 
for  the  race  or  the  individual.  It  narrows  our  view  of  the 
awful  sweep  of  sin ;  for  unless  we  see  that  sin  affects  even 
the  Ruler  of  the  universe,  and  defies  His  unchanging  law, 
its  results  are  limited  to  the  evil  that  we  do  our  fellow- 
men,  which,  as  we  see  it,  is  of  little  importance.  Further, 
it  degrades  moral  law  to  a  mere  arbitrary  dictum  of 
power,  or  to  an  opinion  founded  upon  man's  purblind 
experience.  The  acknowledgment  of  God,  on  the 
contrary,  makes  morality  the  very  essence  of  the  Divine 
nature,  and  the  unchangeable  rule  for  the  life  of  man. 


CHAPTER   IV 

THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  FORM 
Deut.  v.  I -2 1. 

As  the  fourth  chapter  belongs  to  the  speech  which 
concludes  the  legislative  portion  of  Deuteronomy 
both  in  contents  and  language  (see  Chapter  XXIII. ),  we 
shall  pass  on  now  to  the  fifth  chapter,  which  begins  with 
a  recital  of  the  Decalogue.  As  has  already  been  pointed 
out,  the  main  trunk  of  the  Book  of  Deuteronomy  is  a 
repetition  and  expansion  of  the  Law  of  the  Covenant 
contained  in  Exod.  xx. — xxiii.^^^ow,  both  in  Exodus 
and  Deuteronomy,  before  the  more  general  and  detailed 
legislation,  we  have  the  Decalogue,  or  the  Ten  Words,  as 
it  is  called,  in  substantially  the  same  form ;  and  the 
question  immediately  arises  as  to  the  age  at  which  this 
beautifully  systematised  and  organised  code  of  fundamental 
laws  came  into  existence.  Whatever  its  origin,  it  is 
an  exceedingly  remarkable  document.  It  touches  the 
fundamental  principles  of  religious  and  moral  life  with 
so  sure  a  hand  that  at  this  hour,  for  even  the  most 
civilised  nations,  it  sums  up  the  moral  code,  and  that  so 
effectively  that  no  change  or  extension  of  it  has  ever  been 
proposejir  That  being  its  character,  it  becomes  a  question 
of  exceeding  interest  to  decide  whether  it  can  justly  be 
referred  to  so  early  a  time  as  the  days  of  Moses.  In 
both  the    passages  where  it    occurs  it    is  represented  as 

*  See  this  brought  out  in  detail  in  Robertson  Smith,  Old  Testament  in 
Jewish  Churchy  p.  431, 

60 


V.  I-2I.]  THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  FORM  6i 

having  been  given  to  the  people  at  Horeb  by  Yahweh 
Himself,  and  it  is  made  the  earliest  and  most  fundamental 
part  of  the  covenant  between  Him  and  Israel.  It  would 
accordingly  seem  as  if  a  claim  were  made  for  it  as  a 
specially  early  and  specially  sacred  law.  Now,  much  as 
critics  have  denied,  there  have  been  found  very  few  who 
deny  that  in  the  main  some  such  law  as  this  must  have 
been  given  to  Israel  in  Moses'  day.  Even  Kuenen  admits 
as  much  as  that  in  his  History  of  the  Religion  of  Israel. 
The  only  commandment  of  the  ten  he  has  difficulty  in 
accepting  is  the  second,  which  forbids  the  making  of  any 
graven  image  for  worship.  That,  he  thinks,  cannot  have 
been  in  the  original  Decalogue,  not  because  of  any 
peculiarity  of  language,  or  because  of  any  incoherency 
in  composition,  but  simply  because  he  cannot  believe  that 
at  that  early  day  the  religion  of  Yahweh  could  have  been 
so  spiritual  as  to  demand  the  prohibition  of  images.  But 
his  reasons  are  extremely  inadequate ;  more  especially 
as  he  admits  that  the  Ark  was  the  Mosaic  Sanctuary,  and 
that  in  it  there  was  no  image,  as  there  was  none  in  the 
Temple  at  Jerusalem.  That  Yahweh  was  worshipped 
under  the  form  of  a  calf  at  Horeb,  and  afterwards  in 
Northern  Israel  at  Bethel  and  elsewhere,  proves  nothing. 
A  law  does  not  forthwith  extinguish  that  against  which 
it  is  directed,  for  idolatry  continued  even  after  Deuteronomy 
was  accepted  as  the  law.  Moreover,  if,  as  Kuenen  '.l^inks, 
calf- worship  had  existed  in  Israel  before  Moses,  it  was 
not  unnatural  that  it  took  centuries  before  the  higher 
view  superseded  the  lower.  Even  by  Christianity  the 
ancient  superstitions  and  religious  practices  of  heathenism 
were  not  thoroughly  overcome  for  centuries.  Indeed  in 
many  places  they  have  not  yet  been  entirely  suppressed. 
Nor  does  Wcllhausen  ^  make  a  better  case  for  a  late 
Decalogue.     His  hesitation  about  it  is  most  remarkable, 

'  Wellhausen,  Prolegomena,  p.  439. 


62  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


and  the  reasons  he  gives  for  tending  to  think  it  may  be 
late  are  singularly  unsatisfactory.  His  first  reason  is 
that  ^'according  to  Exodus  xxxiv.  the  commandments 
which  stood  upon  the  two  tables  were  quite  different." 
He  relies  on  the  words  in  ver.  28  of  that  chapter — *'  And 
he  (Moses)  was  there  with  the  Lord  forty  days  and  forty 
nights ;  he  did  neither  eat  bread  nor  drink  water.  And 
he  wrote  upon  the  tables  the  words  of  the  covenant,  the 
ten  words" — taking  them  to  imply  that  the  immediately 
preceding  commandments,  which  are  of  the  same  ritual 
character  with  those  which  follow  the  Decalogue  in 
Exodus  XX.,  are  here  called  the  ten  words.  But  it  is  not 
necessary  to  take  the  passage  so.^  According  to  ver.  i 
it  was  Yahweh  who  was  to  write  tne  words  on  the  tables, 
and  we  cannot  suppose  that  so  flagrant  a  contradiction 
should  occur  in  a  single  chapter  as  that  here  it  should 
be  said  that  Moses  wrote  the  tables.  Yahweh,  who  is 
mentioned  in  the  previous  verse,  must  therefore  be  the 
subject  of  wayyikhtobh  (ver.  28),  and  the  ten  words  con- 
sequently are  different  from  the  words  (up  to  ver.  27) 
which  Yahweh  commanded  Moses  to  write,  somewhere, 
but  not  on  the  tables.  Besides,  every  one  who  attempts 
to  make  ten  words  of  the  commands  before  ver.  27 
brings  out  a  different  result,  and  that  of  itself,  as  Dillmann 
says,  is  sufficient  to  show  that  the  second  Decalogue  in 
cnaptci  xxxiv.  is  entirely  fanciful.  Wellhausen's  second 
reason  is  this:  ''The  prohibition  of  images  was  quite 
unknown  during  the  other  period :  Moses  himself  is 
said  to  have  made  a  brazen  serpent,  which  down  to 
Hezekiah's  time  continued  to  be  worshipped  as  an  image 
of  Jehovah."  But  the  Decalogue  does  not  prohibit  the 
making  of  every  image  ;  it  prohibits  the  making  of  images 
for  worship.  Therefore  Moses  might  quite  well  have 
made  a  figure  of  a  serpent,  even  though  he  wrote  the 
Decalogue,  if  it  was  not  meant  for  worship.     But  there 


V.  1-21.]  THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  FORM  63 

is  nothing  said  to  lead  us  to  believe  that  the  serpent  was 
regarded  as  an  image  of  Yahweh.  Indeed  the  very 
contrary  is  asserted ;  and  if  Israel  in  later  times  made  a 
bad  use  of  this  ancient  relic  of  a  great  deliverance,  Moses 
can  hardly  be  held  responsible  for  that.  In  the  third  place, 
Wellhausen  says:  ''The  essentially  and  necessarily  national 
character  of  the  older  phases  of  the  religion  of  Yahweh 
completely  disappears  in  the  quite  universal  code  of  morals 
which  is  given  in  the  Decalogue  as  the  fundamental  law 
of  Israel ;  but  the  entire  series  of  religious  personalities 
throughout  the  period  of  the  Judges  and  Kings — from 
Deborah,  who  praised  Jael's  treacherous  act  of  murder, 
to  David,  who  treated  his  prisoners  of  war  with  the  utmost 
cruelty — make  it  very  difficult  to  believe  that  the  religion 
of  Israel  was  from  the  outset  one  ol  a  specifically  moral 
character."  Surely  this  is  very  feeble  criticism.  On 
the  same  grounds  we  might  declare,  because  of  the 
Massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew,  or  on  account  of  Napoleon's 
reported  poisoning  of  his  own  wounded  at  Acre,  that 
Christianity  was  not  a  religion  of  a  "specifically  moral 
character  "  at  this  present  moment.  Surely  the  facts  that 
people  never  live  at  the  level  of  their  ideals,  and  that  the 
lifting  of  a  nation's  life  is  a  process  which  is  as  slow  as 
the  raising  of  the  level  of  the  delta  of  the  Nile,  should  be 
too  familiar  to  permit  any  one  to  be  misled  by  difficulties 
of  this  kind.  Nor  is  his  last  ground  in  any  degree  more 
convincing.  "  It  is  extremely  doubtful,"  he  says, 
"whether  the  actual  monotheism  which  is  undoubtedly 
presupposed  in  the  universal  moral  precepts  of  the 
Decalogue  could  have  formed  the  foundation  of  a  national 
religion.  It  was  first  developed  out  of  the  national 
religion  at  the  downfall  of  the  nation."  The  obvious 
reply  is  that  this  is  a  petitio  principii  The  whole  debate 
in  regard  to  this  question  is  whether  Moses  was  a 
monotheist,  or  at  least  the  founder  of  a  religion  which  was 


64  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

implicitly  monotheistic  from  the  beginning ;  and  the  date 
of  the  Decalogue  is  interesting  mainly  because  of  the 
light  it  would  throw  upon  that  question.  To  decide  this 
date  therefore  by  the  assertion  that,  being  monotheistic, 
the  Decalogue  cannot  be  Mosaic,  is  to  assume  the  very 
thing  in  dispute.  Wellhausen  himself,  elsewhere  (p.  434), 
seems  to  favour  the  opposite  view.  In  speaking  of  what 
Moses  did  for  Israel  he  says  that  through  '^  the  Torah," 
in  the  sense  of  decisions  given  by  lot  from  the  Ark,  "  he 
gave  a  definite  positive  expression  to  their  sense  of 
nationality  and  their  idea  of  God.  Yahweh  was  not 
merely  the  God  of  Israel ;  as  such  He  was  the  God  at 
once  of  Law  and  of  Justice,  the  basis,  the  informing 
principle,  and  the  implied  postulate  of  their  national  con- 
sciousness"; and  again  (p.  438),  ''As  God  of  the  nation 
Yahweh  became  the  God  of  Justice  and  of  Right ;  as  God 
of  Justice  and  Right,  He  came  to  be  thought  of  as  the 
highest,  and  at  last  as  the  only  power  in  heaven  and 
earth."  In  the  Mosaic  conception  of  God,  therefore, 
Wellhausen  himself  being  witness,  there  lay  implicitly, 
perhaps  even  explicitly,  the  conception  of  Yahweh  as 
"the  only  power  in  heaven  and  earth."  In  that  case, 
is  it  reasonable  to  put  the  Decalogue  late,  because  being 
moral  it  is  universal,  and  so  implies  monotheism  ? 

But  there  is  still  other,  and  perhaps  stronger  evidence, 
that  the  universality  of  the  Decalogue  is  no  indication 
of  a  late  date.  On  the  contrary  it  would  seem,  from 
Professor  Muirhead's  account  of  the  Roman  fas,  that 
universality  in  legal  precept  may  be  a  mark  of  very 
primitive  laws.  Speaking  of  Rome  in  its  earliest  stages 
of  growth,  when  the  circumstances  of  the  people  in  very 
many  respects  resembled  those  of  the  Hebrews  in  Mosaic 
times,^  he  says :  "  We  look  in  vain  for,  and  it  would  be 

'  Ency.  Brit.,  vol.  xx.,  p.  670. 


V.  I-2I.]  THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  FORM  65 

absurd  to  expect,  any  definite  system  of  law  in  those  early 
times.     What  passed  for  it  was  a  composite  o^  /as,  Jus, 
and  bojti  mores,  whose  several  limits  and  characteristics 
it  is  extremely   difficult    to    define."     He    then   proceeds 
to   describe  fas :    "  By  /as   was   understood  the   will  of 
the    gods,    the    laws    given    by    Heaven    for    men    on 
earth,  much  of  it  regulative  of  ceremonial,  but  a  by  no 
means    insignificant    part    embodying    rules    of    conduct. 
It  appears  to  have  had  a  wider  range  than  jus.     There 
were  few  of  its  commands,  prohibitions,  or  precepts  that 
were   addressed    to    men    as   citizens   of  any    particular 
state  ;  a/l  mankind  came  within  its  scope.     It  forbade  that 
a  war  should  be  undertaken  without  the  prescribed  fetial 
ceremonial,   and  required  that  faith  should  be  kept  with 
even  an  enemy — when  a  promise  had  been  made  to  him 
under    sanction    of  an    oath.     It   enjoined    hospitality    to 
foreigners,    because   the    stranger    guest   was   presumed, 
equally  with  his  entertainer,  to  be  an  object  of  solicitude 
to  a  higher  power.     It  punished  murder,  for  it  was  the 
taking  of  a  God-given  life  ;    the  sale  of  a  wife    by  her 
husband,   for  she   had    become    his  partner  in  all  things 
human  and  Divine  ;  the  lifting  of  a  hand  against  a  parent, 
for   it  was  subversive  of   the  first  bond  of  society  and 
religion,  the  reverence  due  by  a  child  to  those  to  whom 
he  owed  his  existence ;    incestuous  connections,  for  they 
defiled  the  altar ;  the  false  oath,  and  the  broken  vow,  for 
they  were  an  insult  to  the  divinities  invoked,"  etc.    In  fact, 
the  Roman  /as  had  much  the  same  character  as  the  Deca- 
logue and  the  legislation  of  the  first  code  (Exod.  xx. — xxiii.). 
Consequently    those   who    have    thought    that    all    early 
legislation     must     be    concrete,     narrow,     particularistic, 
bounded  at  widest  by  the  direct  needs  of  the  men  making 
up  the  clan,  tribe,  or  petty  nationality,  are  wrong.     The 
early  history  of  law  shows  that,  along  with  that,  there  is 
also  a  demand  for  some  expression  of  the  laws  of  life  seen 

5 


66  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

from  the  point  of  view  of  man's  relation  to  God.  That 
fact  greatly  strengthens  the  case  for  the  early  date  of  the 
Decalogue.  For  practically  it  is  the  Hebrew  fas.  If  it 
has  a  higher  tone  and  a  wider  sweep,  if  it  provides  a 
framework  into  which  human  duty  can,  even  now,  without 
undue  stretching  of  it,  be  securely  fitted,  that  is  only  what 
we  should  expect,  if  God  was  working  in  the  history  and 
development  of  this  nation  as  nowhere  else  in  the  world. 
In  short,  the  history  of  primitive  Roman  law  shows  that, 
without  inspiration,  a  feeble  wavering  step  would  have 
been  taken  to  the  development  of  a  code  of  moral  duty, 
within  the  scope  of  which  all  mankind  should  come.  With 
inspiration,  surely  this  effort  would  also  be  made,  and 
made  with  a  success  not  elsewhere  attained. 

In  none  of  the  reasons  which  have  been  advanced, 
therefore,  is  there  anything  to  set  against  the  Biblical 
statement  that  the  ten  words  were  older  and  more  sacred 
than  any  other  portion  of  the  Israelite  legislation,  and  that 
they  were  Mosaic  in  origin.  The  universal  hesitation 
shown  by  the  greater  among  the  most  advanced  critics 
in  definitely  removing  the  Decalogue  from  the  foundations 
of  Israel's  history,  although  its  presence  there  is  so  great 
an  embarrassment  to  them,  lets  us  see  how  strong  the 
case  for  the  Mosaic  origin  is,  and  assures  us  that  the 
evidence  is  all  in  favour  of  this  view. 

But  if  it  be  Mosaic,  at  first  sight  the  conclusion  would 
seem  to  be  that  the  form  of  the  Decalogue  given  in  Exodus 
is  the  more  ancient,  and  that  the  text  in  Deuteronomy  is 
a  later  and  somewhat  extended  version  of  that.  Closer 
examination,  however,  tends  to  suggest  that  the  original 
ten  words,  in  their  Mosaic  form,  differed  from  any  of  the 
texts  we  have,  and  that  of  these  the  Exodus  text  in  its 
present  form  is  later  than  that  in  Deuteronomy.  The 
great  difference  in  length  between  the  two  halves  of  the 
Decalogue  suggests  the  probability  that  originally  all  the 


V.  I -2 1.]  THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  FORM  67 

commandments  were  short,  and  much  the  same  in  style 
and  character  as  the  last  half,  ''  Thou  shalt  not  steal," 
and  so  on.  Further,  when  the  reasons  and  inducements 
given  for  the  observance  of  the  longer  commands  are  set 
aside,  just  such  short  commands  are  left  to  us  as  we  find 
in  the  second  table.  Lastly,  differences  between  the  ver- 
sions in  Exodus  and  Deuteronomy  occur  in  almost  every 
case  in  those  parts  of  the  text  which  may  be  regarded  as 
appendices.  In  fact  there  are  only  two  variations  in  the 
proper  text  of  the  commands.  In  the  fourth,  we  have  in 
Exodus  "  Remember  the  Sabbath  day,"  while  in  Deuter- 
onomy we  have  "Observe  the  Sabbath  day";  but  the 
meaning  is  the  same  in  both  cases.  In  the  tenth,  in  Exodus 
the  command  is  ''  Thou  shalt  not  covet  thy  neighbour's 
house  "  ;  and  the  "  house  "  is  explained  by  the  succeeding 
clause,  ''  Thou  shalt  not  covet  thy  neighbour's  wife,  nor 
his  manservant,"  etc.,  to  mean  "household"  in  its  widest 
sense.  In  Deuteronomy  the  old  meaning  of  "house"  as 
household  and  goods  has  fallen  out  of  use,  and  the 
component  parts  of  the  neighbour's  household  possessions 
are  named,  beginning  with  his  wife.  Then  follows  the 
"  house  "  in  its  narrow  meaning,  as  the  mere  dwelling, 
grouped  along  with  the  slaves  and  cattle,  and  with 
tithawweh  substituted  in  Hebrew  for  tachmodh.  Funda- 
mentally therefore  the  two  recensions  are  the  same. 
Even  in  the  reasons  and  explanations  there  is  only  one 
really  important  variation.  In  Exod.  xx.  ii  the  reason 
for  the  observance  of  the  fourth  commandment  is  stated 
thus  :  "  For  in  six  days  Yahweh  made  heaven  and  earth, 
the  sea  and  all  that  in  them  is,  and  rested  the  seventh 
day;  therefore  Yahweh  blessed  the  Sabbath  day,  and 
hallowed  it."  In  Deuteronomy,  on  the  other  hand,  that 
reason  is  omitted,  and  in  its  place  we  find  this  :  "  And  thou 
shalt  remember  that  thou  wast  a  servant  in  the  land  of 
Egypt,  and  Yahweh  thy  God  brought  thee  out  thence  by 


68  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

a   mighty  hand,  and   by  a  stretched  out  arm  ;  therefore 
Yahweh  thy  God  commanded  thee  to  keep  the  Sabbath." 
Now  if  the  reference  to  the  creation  had  formed  part  of 
the    original   text  of   the   Decalogue    in  the  days  of  the 
author  of  Deuteronomy,   if  he  had    that    before    him  as 
actually  spoken  by  Yahweh,  it  is  difficult  to  believe  that 
he  would  have  left  it  out  and  substituted  another  reason 
in  its  stead.     He  would  have  no  object  in  doing  so,  for  he 
could   have   added    his  own    reason   after  that   given  in 
Exodus,  had  he  so  desired      It  is  likely,  therefore,  that 
in  the  original   text    no   reason  appeared ;  that  Deuter- 
onomy first  added  a  reason  ;  v/hile  ver.  1 1  in  Exod.  xx. 
was    probably    inserted    there   from    a    combination   of 
Exod,  xxxi.   I'j  b   and    Gen.  ii.  2^, — ^^  For  in    six    days 
Yahweh  made  heaven  and  earth,  and  on  the  seventh  day 
He  rested  and  was  refreshed  "  ;  "  and  He  rested  on  the 
seventh  day  from  all   His   work    which  He  had  made." 
Both  these  texts  belong  to  P  and  differ  in  style  altogether 
from  JE,  with  whose  language  all  the  rest  of  the  setting 
of  the  Decalogue   corresponds.       On    these  suppositions 
Exod.  XX.  1 1  would-  necessarily  be  the  latest  part  of  the 
two    texts.     Originally,  therefore,   the   Mosaic  commands 
probably  ran  thus  : — 

"  I  am  Yahweh  thy  God,  which  brought  thee  out  of  the 
land  of  Egypt,  out  of  the  house  of  bondage. 

^'  I.  Thou  shalt  not  have  any  other  gods  before  Me. 
*'  II.  Thou  shalt  not  make  unto  thee  any  graven  image. 

'*  III.  Thou  shalt  not  take  the  name  of  Yahweh  thy  God 
in  vain. 

"  IV.  Remember  {or  Keep)  the  day  of  rest  to  sanctify 
it. 

*'  V.  Honour  thy  father  and  thy  mother. 
"  VI.  Thou  shalt  not  kill. 

**  VII.  Thou  shalt  not  commit  adultery. 

''VIII.  Thou  shaltmot  steal. 


V.  1-2 1.]  THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  FORM  69 

"IX.  Thou  shalt  not  bear  false  witness  against  thy 
neighbour. 

"  X.  Thou  shalt  not  covet  thy  neighbour's  house." 

In  that  shape  they  contain  everything  that  is  funda- 
mentally important,  and  exhibit  the  foundations  of  the 
Mosaic  religion  and  polity  in  an  entirely  satisfactory  and 
credible  form. 

But,  before  passing  on  to  consider  the  substance  of  the 
Decalogue,  it  will  be  worth  our  while  to  consider  what 
the  full  significance  of  these  differing  recensions  of  the 
Decalogue  is.  In  both  places  the  words  are  quoted 
directly  as  having  been  spoken  by  Yahweh  to  the  people, 
and  they  are  introduced  by  the  quoting  word  ''  saying." 
Now  if  we  do  not  wish  to  square  what  we  read  with  any 
theory,  the  slight  divergences  between  the  two  recensions 
need  not  trouble  us,  for  we  have  the  substance  of  what 
was  said,  and  in  the  main  the  very  words,  and  that  is 
really  all  we  need  to  be  assured  of.  But  if,  on  the 
contrary,  we  are  going  to  insist  that,  this  being  part  of 
an  inspired  book,  every  word  must  be  pressed  with  the 
accuracy  of  a  masoretic  scribe,  then  we  are  brought  into 
inextricable  difficulties.  It  cannot  be  true  that  at  Horeb 
Yahweh  said  two  different  things  on  this  special  occasion. 
One  or  both  of  these  accounts  must  be  inaccurate,  in  the 
pedantic  sense  of  accuracy,  and  yet  both  have  the  same 
claim  to  be  inspired.  In  fact  both  are  inspired  ;  it  is  the 
theory  of  inspiration  which  demands  for  revelation  this 
kind  of  accuracy  that  must  go  to  the  wall. 

It  will  be  seen  that  this  instance  is  very  instructive  as 
to  the  method  of  the  ancient  Hebrews  in  dealing  with 
legislation  which  was  firmly  held  to  be  Mosaic,  or  even 
directly  Divine.  If  we  are  right  in  holding  that  originally 
the  ten  words  were,  as  we  have  supposed,  limited  to 
definite  short  commands,  this  example  teaches  us  that 
where  there  could  be  no  question  of  deceit,  or  even  an 


70  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

object  for  deceiving,  additions  calculated  to  meet  the  needs 
and  defects  of  the  particular  period  at  which  the  laws  are 
written  down,  are  inserted  without  any  hint  that  they  did 
not  form  part  of  the  original  document.     If  this  has  been 
done,  even  to  the  extent  we  have  seen  reason  to  infer, 
in  a   small,   carefully  ordered,  and  specially  ancient  and 
sacred  code,  how  much  more   freely  may  we  expect  the 
same  thing    to   have  been   done  in  the  looser  and  more 
fluid    regulations    of    the    large    political    and    ceremonial 
codes,    which    on   any  supposition    were    posterior,    and 
much  less   fundamental   and    sacred.     That    there  is    for 
lis  something  disappointing,  and  even   slightly  question- 
able,  in  such   action    is  really    nothing    to    the    purpose. 
We   have  to  learn  from    the   actual    facts   of  revelation 
how    revelation    may    be,    or    perhaps    even    must    be, 
conveyed ;    and    we    cannot  too   soon   learn    the   lesson 
that  to  a  singular  degree,  and  in  many  other  directions 
than  their  notions  of  accuracy,  the  ancient  mind  differs 
from  the  modern  mind,  and  that  at  any  period  there  is  a 
great  gulf  to  be  crossed  before  a  Western  mind  can  get 
into  any  intimate  and  sure  rappoH  with  an  Eastern  mind. 

One  other  thing  is  noteworthy.  Wellhausen  has 
already  been  quoted  as  to  the  quite  universal  and  moral 
character  of  the  Decalogue  ;  and  his  view,  that  a  code  so 
free  from  merely  local  and  cerem.onial  provisions  can 
hardly  be  Mosaic,  has  been  discussed.  But,  while  rejecting 
his  conclusion,  we  must  adhere  to  his  premisses.  By 
emphasising  the  universal  nature  of  the  ten  command- 
ments, and  by  showing  that  they  preceded  the  ceremonial 
law  by  many  centuries,  the  critical  school  have  cut  away 
the  ground  from  under  the  semi-antinomian  views  once  so 
prevalent,  and  always  so  popular,  with  those  who  call 
themselves  advanced  thinkers.  It  is  now  no  longer 
possible  to  maintain  that  the  Decalogue  was  part  of  a 
purely  Jewish  law,  binding  only  upon  Jews  and  passing 


V.  I -2 1.]  THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  FORM  71 

away  at  the  advent  of  Christianity  as  the  ceremonial  law 
did.  Of  course  this  view  was  never  really  taken  seriously 
in  reference  to  murder  or  theft ;  but  it  has  always  been  a 
strong  point  with  those  who  have  wished  to  secularise  the 
Sunday.  Now  if  the  advanced  critical  position  be  in  any 
degree  true,  then  the  ten  commandments  stand  quite 
separate  from  the  ceremonial  law,  have  nothing  in 
common  with  it,  and  are  handed  down  to  us  in  a  docu- 
ment written  before  the  conception  even  of  a  binding 
ceremonial  law  had  dawned  upon  the  mind  of  any  man  in 
Israel.  Nor  is  there  anything  ceremonial  or  Jewish  in  the 
command,  Remember  or  Observe  the  rest-day  to  keep  it 
holy.  In  the  reasons  given  in  Exodus  and  Deuteronomy 
we  have  the  two  principles  which  make  this  a  moral  and 
universal  command — the  necessity  for  rest,  and  the 
necessity  of  an  opportunity  to  cultivate  the  spiritual 
nature.  Nothing  indeed  is  said  about  worship  ;  but  it  lies 
in  the  nature  of  the  case  that  if  secular  work  was  rigor- 
ously forbidden,  mere  slothful  abstinence  from  activity 
cannot  have  been  all  that  was  meant.  Worship,  and 
instruction  in  the  things  of  the  higher  life,  must  certainly 
have  been  practised  in  such  a  nation  as  Israel  on  such  a 
day  ;  and  we  may  therefore  say  that  they  were  intended  by 
this  commandment.  Understood  in  that  way,  the  fourth 
commandment  shows  a  delicate  perception  of  the  con- 
ditions of  the  higher  life,  which  surpasses  even  the 
prohibition  of  covetousness  in  the  tenth.  In  the  words  of 
a  working  man  who  was  advocating  its  observance,  ^'  It 
gives  God  a  chance  "  ;  that  is,  it  gives  man  the  leisure  to 
attend  to  God.  But  the  moral  point  of  view  which  it 
implies  is  so  high,  and  so  difficult  of  attainment,  that  it  is 
only  now  that  the  nations  of  Europe  are  awaking  to  the 
inestimable  moral  benefits  of  the  Sabbath  they  have 
despised.  Because  of  this  difficulty  too,  many  who  think 
themselves  to  be  leaders  in  the  path  of  improvement,  and 


72  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

are  esteemed  by  others  to  be  so,  are  never  weary  of  trying 
to  weaken  the  moral  consciousness  of  the  people,  until  they 
can  steal  this  benefit  away,  on  the  ground  that  Sabbath- 
keeping  is  a  mere  ceremonial  observance.  So  far  from 
being  that,  it  is  a  moral  duty  of  the  highest  type  ;  and 
the  danger  in  which  it  seems  at  times  to  stand  is  due 
mainly  to  the  fact  that  to  appreciate  it  needs  a  far  more 
trained  and  sincere  conscience  than  most  of  us  can  bring 
to  the  consideration  of  it. 


CHAPTER   V 
THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE 

THAT  the  Decalogue  in  any  of  its  forms  must  have 
been  the  work  of  one  mind,  and  that  a  very  great 
and  powerful  mind,  will  be  evident  on  the  most  cursory 
inspection.  We  have  not  here,  as  we  have  in  other  parts 
of  Scripture,  fragments  of  legislation  supplementary  to  a 
large  body  of  customary  law,  fragments  which,  because  of 
their  intrinsic  importance  or  the  necessities  of  a  particular 
time,  have  been  written  down.  We  have  here  an  extra- 
ordinarily successful  attempt  to  bring  within  a  definite 
small  compass  the  fundamental  laws  of  social  and  individual 
life.  The  wonder  of  it  does  not  lie  in  the  individual 
precepts.  All  of  them,  or  almost  all  of  them,  can  be 
paralleled  in  the  legislation  of  other  peoples,  as  indeed 
could  not  fail  to  be  the  case  if  the  fundamental  laws  of 
society  and  of  individual  conduct  were  aimed  at.  These 
must  be  obeyed,  more  or  less,  in  every  society  that 
survives.  It  is  the  wisdom  with  which  the  selection  has 
been  made  ;  it  is  the  sureness  of  hand  which  has  picked 
out  just  those  things  which  were  central,  and  has  laid 
aside  as  irrelevant  everything  local,  temporary,  and  purely 
ceremonial ;  it  is  the  relation  in  which  the  whole  is  placed 
to  God, — these  give  this  small  code  its  distinction.  In 
these  respects  it  is  Hke  the  Lord's  Prayer.  It  is  vain 
for  men  to  point  out  this  petition  of  that  unique  prayer  as 
occurring  here,  that  other  as  occurring  there,  and  a  third 
as    found    in    yet    another  .place.     Even    if  every   single 

73 


74  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

petition  contained  in  it  could  be  unearthed  somewhere,  it 
would  still  remain  as  unique  as  ever ;  for  where  can  you 
find  a  prayer  which,  like  it,  groups  the  fundamental 
cries  of  humanity  to  God  in  such  short  space  and  with 
so  sure  a  touch,  and  brings  them  all  into  such  deep  con- 
nection with  the  Fatherhood  of  God  ?  In  both  cases,  in 
the  prayer  and  in  the  Decalogue  alike,  we  must  recognise 
that  the  grouping  is  the  work  of  one  mind ;  and  in  both 
we  must  recognise  also  that,  whatever  were  the  natural 
and  human  powers  of  the  mind  that  wrought  the  code 
and  prayer  respectively,  the  main  element  in  the  success 
that  has  attended  their  work  is  the  extraordinary  degree 
in  which  they  were  illumined  by  the  Divine  Spirit.  But 
where,  between  the  time  of  Moses  and  the  time  when 
Deuteronomy  first  laid  hold  upon  the  life  of  the  nation, 
are  we  to  look  for  a  legislator  of  this  pre-eminence  ?  So 
far  as  we  know  the  histor}^,  there  is  no  name  that  would 
occur  to  us.  So  far  as  can  be  seen,  Moses  alone  has 
been  marked  out  for  us  in  the  history  of  his  people  as 
equal  to,  and  likely  to  undertake,  such  a  task.  Every- 
thing, therefore,  concurs  to  the  conclusion  that  in  the 
Decalogue  we  have  the  first,  the  most  sacred,  and  the 
fundamental  law  in  Israel.  Here  Moses  spoke  for  God ; 
and  whatever  additions  to  his  original  ten  words  later  times 
may  have  made,  they  have  not  obscured  or  overlaid  what 
must  be  ascribed  to  him.  He  may  not  have  been  the 
author  of  much  that  bears  his  name,  for  unquestionably 
there  were  developments  later  than  his  time  which  were 
called  Mosaic  because  they  were  a  continuation  and 
adaptation  of  his  work ;  but  we  are  justified  in  believing 
that  here  we  have  the  first  law  he  gave  to  Israel ;  and  in 
it  we  should  be  able  to  see  the  really  germinal  principles 
of  the  religion  he  taught. 

Now,  manifestly,  a  religion  which  spoke  its  first  word 
in  the  ten  commandments,  even  in  their  simplest   form. 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  .SUBSTANCE  75 

must  have   been   in  its  very  heart  and   core  moral.      It 
must  always   have   been  a    heresy  therefore,  a  denial  of 
the  fundamental  Mosaic  conception,  to  place  ritual  observ- 
ance per  se   above    moral    and    religious    conduct,    as    a 
means  of  approach  to  Yahweh.     On  any  reading  of  the 
commandments  only  the  (third    and    fourth    (two  out   of 
ten)  refer  to  matters  of  mere  worship  ;    and  even  these 
may    more   correctly  be   taken  to   refer  primarily  to  the 
moral   aspects    of    the    cultus.       All    the   rest    deal    with 
fundamental    relations   to    God    and   man.  j  Consequently 
the  prophets  who,  after  the  manner  of  Amos  and  Hosea, 
denounce  the  prevailing  belief  that  Yahweh's  help  could  be 
secured  for  Israel,  whatever  its  moral  state,  by  offerings 
and    sacrifices,    were    not  teaching  a  new  doctrine,   first 
discovered    by  themselves.     They  were   simply  reassert- 
ing the    fundamental    principles    of  the   Mosaic    religion. 
Reverence  and  righteousness — these  from  the  first  were 
the  twin  pillars  upon  which  it  rested.     Before  ever  the 
ceremonial  law,  even  in  its  most   rudimentary  form,  had 
been  given,  these  were  emphasised  in  the  strongest  way 
as  the  requirements  of  Yahweh  ;  and  the  people  whom 
the    prophets    reproved,    instead     of    being    the    repre- 
sentatives of  the  ancient  Yahwistic  faith,  had  rejected  it. 
Whether    the    popular   view  was  a   falling  away  from  a 
truer   view   which    had    once    been   popular,    or  whether 
it  represented   a    heathen   tendency  which   remained   in 
Israel  from  pre-Mosaic   times   and  had  not  even  in   the 
days  of  Amos  been  overcome,  it  seems  undeniable  that  it 
was    entirely  contrary  to    the   fundamental    principles   of 
Yahwism  as  given  by  Moses.     Even  by  the  latest  narra- 
tors, those  who  brought  our  Pentateuch  into  its  present 
shape,  and  who  were,  it  is  supposed,  completely  under 
the  influence  of  ceremonial  Judaism,  the  primarily  moral 
character  of  Yahweh's  religion  w^as  acknowledged  by  the 
place  they  gave  to  the  ten  commandments.     They  alone 


76  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

are  handed  down  as  spoken  by  Yahweh  Himself,  and  as 
having  preceded  all  other  commands  ;  and  the  terrors  of 
Sinai,  the  thunder  and  the  earthquake,  are  made  more 
intimately  the  accompaniments  of  this  law  than  of  any 
other.  Unquestionably  the  mind  of  Israel  always  was, 
that  here,  and  not  in  the  ceremonial  law,  was  the  centre 
of  gravity  of  Yahwism.  In  the  view  of  that  fact  it  is 
somewhat  hard  to  understand  how  so  many  writers  of  our 
times,  who  admit  the  Decalogue  to  have  been  Mosaic,  or 
at  any  rate  pre-prophetic,  yet  deny  the  prevailingly  moral 
character  of  the  early  religion  of  Israel.  When  this  law 
was  once  promulgated,  the  old  naturalism  in  which  Israel, 
like  other  ancient  races,  had  been  entangled  was  re- 
pudiated, and  the  relation  between  Yahweh  and  His 
people  was  declared  to  be  one  which  rested  upon  moral 
conduct  in  the  widest  sense  of  that  term.  And  the 
ground  of  this  fact  is  plainly  declared  here  to  be  the 
character  of  Yahweh:  ''  I  am  the  Lord  thy  God,  that 
brought  thee  out  of  the  land  of  Egypt,  out  of  the  house 
of  bondage."  He  was  their  deliverer.  He  had  a  right  to 
command  them,  and  His  commands  revealed  His  nature 
to  His  people. 

The  first  four  commandments  show  that  Yahweh  was 
already  conceived  as  a  spiritual  being,  removed  by  a 
whole  heaven  from  the  gods  of  the  Canaanite  nations  by 
whom  Israel  was  surrounded.  These  were  mere  repre- 
sentatives of  the  powers  of  nature.  As  such  they  were 
regarded  as  existing  in  pairs,  each  god  having  his  female 
counterpart;  and  their  acts  had  all  the  indifference  to 
moral  considerations  which  nature  in  its  processes  shows. 
They  dwelt  in  mountain  tops,  in  trees,  in  rude  stones,  or 
in  obelisks,  and  they  were  worshipped  by  rites  so 
sanguinary  and  licentious  that  Canaanite  worship  bore 
everywhere  a  darker  stain  than  even  nature-worship  else- 
where had  disclosed.     In  contrast  to  all  this  the  Yahweh 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  77 

of  the  Decalogue  is  "  alone,"  in  solitary  and  unapproach- 
able separation.     Amid  all  the  unbridled  speculation  that 
has  been   let  loose  on  this  subject,  no  one,  I  think,  has 
ever  ventured  to  join  with  Him  any  name  of  a  goddess, 
and  He  sternly  repudiates  the  worship  of  any  other  god 
besides    Him.     Now,    though    there    is    nothing    said    of 
monotheism   here,   i.e.   of  the    doctrine   that    no  god   but 
one  exists,  yet,  in   contrast  to  the  hospitality  which  dis- 
tinguished   and    distinguishes    nature-worship    in    all    its 
forms,  Yahweh  here  claims  from  His  people  worship  of 
the  most  exclusive  kind.     Besides  Him  they  were  to  have 
no    object    of    worship.       He,    in    His    unapproachable 
separateness,   had    alone  a    claim    upon    their   reverence. 
Further,  in  contrast  to  the  gods  who  dwelt  in  trees  and 
stones    and   pillars,   and    who   could    be    represented    by 
symbols  of  that  kind,  Yahweh  sternly  forbade  the  making 
of  any  image  to  represent   Him.     Thereby  He  declared 
Himself  spiritual,  in  so  far  as  He  claimed  that  no  visible 
thing  could  adequately  represent  Him.     In  contrast  to  the 
ethnic  religions  in  general,  even  that  of  Zarathushtra,  the 
noblest  of  all,  where  only  the  natural  element  of  fire  was 
taken   to    be    the   god  or    his    symbol,    this    fundamental 
command  asserts  the  supersensuous  nature  of  the  Deity, 
thereby  rising  at  one  step  clear  above  all  naturalism. 

So  great  is  the  step  indeed,  that  Kuenen  and  others, 
who  cannot  escape  the  evidence  for  the  antiquity  of  the 
other  commandments,  insist  that  this  at  least  cannot  be 
pre-prophetic,  since  we  have  such  numerous  proofs  of  the 
worship  of  Yahweh  by  images,  down  at  least  to  the  time 
of  Josiah's  reform.  But,  by  all  but  Stade,  it  is  admitted 
that  there  was  at  Shiloh  under  Eli,  and  at  Jerusalem 
under  David  and  Solomon,  no  visible  representation  of 
Deity.  Now  the  same  writers  who  tell  us  this  everywhere 
represent  the  worship  of  Yahweh  by  images  as  existing 
among  the  people.     According  to  their  view,  the  nation 


78  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

had  a  continual  and  hereditary  tendency  to  slip  into  image- 
worship,   or  to  maintain  it  as  pre-Mosaic  custom.     And 
it  is  quite  certain  that  up  even  to  the  Captivity,  and  after, 
when,  according  to  even  the  very  boldest  negative  view, 
this  command  had  been  long  known,  image-worship,  not 
only  of  Yahweh,  but  also  of  false  gods  and  of  the  host  of 
heaven,  was  largely  prevalent.     Only  the  Captivity,  with 
its  hardships  and  trials,  brought  Israel  to  see  that  image- 
worship  was  incompatible  with  any  true  belief  in  Yahweh. 
Undeniably,  therefore,   the  existence  of  an   authoritative 
prohibition  does  not  necessarily  produce  obedience  ;  and 
the  Biblical  view  that  the  Decalogue  is  Israel's  earliest  law 
proves  to  be  the  more  reasonable,  as  well  as  the  better 
authenticated  of  the  two.     If,  after  the  command  beyond 
all   doubt  existed   in   Israel,  it  needed  the  calamities  of 
Israel's  last  days,   and  the   hardships  and  griefs  of  the 
Exile,  to  get  it  completely  observed,  and  if  in  Jerusalem 
and  at  Shiloh   in    the   pre-prophetic   time   Yahweh   was 
worshipped  without  images,  there  can  hardly  be  a  doubt 
that  this  command  must  have  existed  in  the  earliest  period. 
For  no  rehgion  is  to  be  judged  by  the  actual  practice  of 
the  multitude.     The  true  criterion  is  its  highest  point ; 
and  the  imageless  worship  of  Jerusalem  is  much  more 
difficult  to  understand   if  the   second  commandment  was 
not  acknowledged  previously  in  Israel,  than  it  would  be  if 
the  Decalogue,  essentially  as  we  now  have  it,  was  acknow- 
ledged in  the  days  before  the  kingship  at  least.^ 

The  arguments  advanced  by  Kuenen  and  Wellhausen 
for  a  contrary  view,  beyond  those  we  have  just  been  con- 
sidering, rest  on  an  undue  extension  of  the  prohibition  to 
make  any  likeness  of  anything.  They  adduce  the  brazen 
serpent  of  Moses,  and  the  Cherubim,  and  the  brazen  bulls 


/ 


'  Granting  that  the  commandment  did  not  exist,  one  asks,  What  was  it 
in  Yahwism  which  determined  the  Jerusalem  Sanctuary  to  be  imageless  ? 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  79 

that  bore  the  brazen  laver  in  the  court  of  the  Temple  at 
Jerusalem,  and  the  ornaments  of  that  building,  as  a  proof 
that  even  in  Jerusalem  this  commandment  cannot  have 
been  known.  But,  as  we  have  seen,  the  original  command 
prohibited  only  the  making  of  a  pesely  i.e.  of  an  image  for 
worship.  The  making  of  likenesses  of  men  and  animals 
for  mere  purposes  of  art  and  adornment  was  never  in- 
cluded ;  and  the  whole  objection  falls  to  the  ground  unless 
it  be  asserted  that  the  bulls  under  the  basin  were  actually 
worshipped  by  those  who  came  into  the  Temple  I 

The  supersensuous  nature  of  Yahweh  must,  therefore, 
be  taken  to  be  a  fundamental  part  of  the  Mosaic  religion. 
But  besides  being  solitary  and  supersensuous,  Yahweh  was 
declared  by  Moses,  perhaps  by  His  very  name,  to  be  not 
only  mighty,  but  helpful.  The  preface  to  the  whole  series 
of  commandments  is,  "  I  am  Yahweh  thy  God,  who  brought 
thee  forth  out  of  the  land  of  Egypt."  Now  of  all  the 
derivations  of  Yahweh,  that  which  most  nearly  commands 
universal  acceptance  is  its  derivation  from  hayah^  to  be. 
And  the  probabilities  are  all  in  favour  of  the  view  that  it 
does  not  imply  mere  timeless  existence,  as  the  translation  of 
the  explanation  in  Exodus  ^  has  led  many  to  believe.  That 
is  a  purely  philosophical  idea  entirely  outside  of  morality, 
and  it  can  hardly  be  that  the  introduction  to  this  moral 
code,  which  announces  the  author  of  it,  should  contain  no 
moral  reference.  If  the  name  be  from  Qal,  and  be  connected 
with  ehyehf  then  it  means,  as  Dillmann  says  {Exodus  and 
Leviticus^  p.  35),  that  He  will  be  what  He  has  been,  and 
the  name  involves  a  reference  to  all  that  the  God  of  Israel 
has  been  in  the  past.  Such  He  will  be  in  the  future, 
for  He  is  what  He  is,  without  variableness  or  shadow  of 
turning.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  it  be  from  Hiphil,  it  will 
mean  "  He  who  causes  to  be,"  the  creator.  In  either  case 
there  is  a  clear  rise  above  the  ordinary  Semitic  names  for 

'   iii.  14. 


8o  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

God,  Baal,  Molecli,  Milkom,  which  all  express  mere  lord- 
ship. No  doubt  Yahweh  was  also  called  Baal,  or  Lord, 
just  as  we  find  Him  in  the  Psalms  addressed  as  "  my 
King  and  my  God  "  ;  but  the  specially  Mosaic  name,  the 
personal  name  of  the  God  of  Israel,  does  undoubtedly 
imply  quite  another  quality  in  God.  It  is  the  Helper  who 
has  revealed  Himself  to  Israel  who  here  speaks.  Hence 
the  addition,  '*  who  brought  thee  out  of  the  land  of 
Egypt."  It  is  as  a  Saviour  that  Yahweh  addresses  His 
people.  By  His  very  name  Pie  lifts  all  the  commands 
He  gives  out  of  the  region  of  mere  might,  or  the  still 
lower  region  of  gratification  at  offerings  and  precious 
things  bestowed,  into  the  region  of  gratitude  and  love. 

Further,  by  issuing  this  code  under  the  name  of  Yahweh 
Moses  claimed  for  Him  a  moral  character.  Whether  the 
Hebrew  word  for  holy,  qddhoshy  implied  more  in  those 
days  than  mere  separateness,  may  be  doubted ;  but  it  is 
impossible  that  the  idea  which  we  now  connect  with  the 
word  "  holy  "  should  not  have  been  held  to  be  congruous 
to,  and  expressive  of,  the  nature  of  Yahweh.  Here  morality 
in  its  initial  and  fundamental  stages  is  set  forth  as  an 
expression  of  His  will.  And  similarly,  righteousness 
must  also  be  an  attribute  of  His,  for  justice  between  man 
and  man  is  made  to  be  His  demand  upon  men.  He  Him- 
self, therefore,  must  be  faithful  as  well  as  holy,  and  His 
emancipation  from  the  clinging  chain  of  mere  naturalism 
was  thereby  completed.  The  Yahweh  of  the  Decalogue 
is  therefore  absolutely  alone.  He  is  supersensuous.  He 
is  the  Helper  and  Saviour,  and  He  is  holy  and  true. 
These  are  His  fundamental  qualities.  Such  qualities  may 
be  supposed  to  be  present  only  in  their  elements,  even 
to  the  mind  of  Moses  himself:  yet  the  fundamental 
germinal  point  was  there :  and  all  that  has  grown  out  of 
it  may  be  justly  put  to  the  credit  of  this  first  revelation. 

A  moment's  thought  will  show  how  the  teaching  that 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  8i 

Yahweh  alone  was  to  be  worshipped  broke  away  from 
the  main  stream  of  Semitic  behef,  and  prepared  the  way 
for  the  ultimate  prevalence  of  the  belief  that  God  was  one. 
That  He  was  siipersensuous,  so  that  He  could  not  rightly 
or  adequately  be  represented  by  any  likeness  of  anything 
in  heaven  or  earth  or  sea,  left  no  possible  outlet  for 
thought  about  Him,  save  in  the  direction  that  He  was  a 
Spirit.  In  essence  consequently  the  spirituality  of  God 
was  thereby  secured.  Still  more  important  perhaps  was 
the  conception  of  Yahweh  as  the  Helper  and  Deliverer, 
the  Saviour  of  His  people  ;  for  this  at  once  suggested 
the  thought  that  the  true  bond  between  God  and  man 
was  not  mere  necessity,  nor  mere  dependence  upon  resist- 
less power,  but  love — love  to  a  Divine  Helper  who  revealed 
Himself  in  gracious  acts  and  providences,  and  who  longed 
after  and  cared  for  His  people  with  a  perfectly  undeserved 
affection.  Lastly,  His  holiness  and  faithfulness,  His  right- 
eousness in  fact,  held  implicit  in  it  His  supremacy  and 
universality.  As  Wellhausen  has  said,  "  As  God  of 
justice  and  right,  Yahweh  came  to  be  thought  of  as  the 
highest,  and  at  last  as  the  only  power  in  heaven  and 
earth."  Whether  that  last  stage  was  present  to  the  mind 
of  Moses,  or  of  any  who  received  the  commandments  in 
the  first  place,  is  of  merely  secondary  importance.  At 
the  very  least,  the  way  which  must  necessarily  lead  to 
that  stage  was  opened  here,  and  the  mind  of  man  entered 
upon  the  path  to  a  pure  monotheism,  a  monotheism 
which  separated  God  from  the  world,  and  referred  to 
His  will  all  that  happened  in  the  world  of  created  things. 
God  is  One,  God  is  a  Spirit,  God  is  Love,  and  God 
rules  over  all — these  are  the  attributes  of  Yahweh  as 
the  Decalogue  sets  them  forth;  and  in  principle  the 
whole  higher  life  of  humanity  was  secured  by  the  great 
synthesis. 

Like  all  beginnings,   this  was   an   achievement  of  the 

6 


82  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

7  '     """    '  ■      ■ 

highest  kind?^'"  Nowhere  but  in  the  soul  of  one  Divinely 
enhghtened  man  could  such  a  revelation  have  made  itself 
known  ;  and  the  soHtude  of  a  lonely  shepherd's  life,  fol- 
lowing upon  the  stir  and  training  of  a  high  place  in  the 
cultured  society  of  Egypt,  gave  precisely  the  kind  of 
environment  which  would  prepare  the  soul  to  hear  the 
voice  by  which  God  spoke.  For  we  are  not  to  suppose 
that  this  revelation  came  to  Moses  without  any  effort  or 
preparation  on  his  part.  God  does  not  reveal  His  highest 
to  the  slothful  or  the  debased.  Even  when  He  speaks 
from  Sinai  in  thunder  and  in  flame,  it  is  only  the  man 
who  has  been  exercising  himself  in  these  great  matters 
who  can  understand  and  remember.  All  the  people  had 
been  terrified  by  the  Divine  Presence,  but  they  forgot 
the  law  immediately  and  fell  back  into  idolatry.  It  was 
Moses  who  retained  it  and  brought  it  back  to  them  again. 
His  personality  was  the  organ  of  the  Divine  will ;  and  in 
this  law  which  he  promulgated  Moses  laid  the  foundation  / 
of  all  that  now  forms  the  most  cherished  heritage  of  meii^ 
The  central  thing  in  religion  is  the  character  of  Gou. 
Contrary  to  the  prevailing  feeling,  which  makes  many  say 
that  they  know  nothing  of  God,  but  are  sure  of  their  duty 
to  man,  history  teaches  that,  in  the  end,  man's  thought  oi 
God  is  the  decisive  thing.  Everything  else  shapes  itself 
according  to  that ;  and  by  taking  the  first  great  steps, 
which  broke  through  the  limits  of  mere  naturalism,  Moses 
laid  the  foundation  of  all  that  was  to  come.  There  was 
here  the  promise  and  the  potency  of  all  higher  life :  love 
and  holiness  had  their  way  prepared,  so  that  they  should 
one  day  become  supreme  in  man's  conception  of  the 
highest  life :  the  confused  halting  between  the  material 
and  the  spiritual,  which  can  be  traced  in  the  very  highest 
conceptions  of  merely  natural  religions,  was  in  principle 
done  away.  And  what  was  here  gained  was  never  lost 
again.     Even  though  the  multitude  never  really  grasped 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  83 

all  that  Moses  had  proclaimed  Yahweh  to  be ;  and  though 
it  should  be  proved,  which  is  as  yet  by  no  means  the 
case,  that  even  David  thought  of  Him  as  limited  in  power 
and  claims  by  the  extent  of  the  land  which  Israel  inhabited  ; 
and  though,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  full-orbed  universality 
which  the  ten  commandments  implicitly  held  in  them  was 
not  attained  under  the  old  covenant  at  all ;  yet  these  ten 
words  remained  always  an  incitement  to  higher  thoughts. 
No  advance  made  in  religion  or  morals  by  the  chosen 
people  ever  superseded  them.  Even  when  Christ  came, 
He  came  not  to  destroy  but  to  fulfil.  The  highest  reach 
of  even  His  thoughts  as  regards  God  could  be  brought 
easily  and  naturally  under  the  terms  of  this  fundamental 
revelation  to  Israel. 

The  remaining  commands,  those  which  deal  with  the 
relations  of  men  to  each  other,  are  naturally  introduced 
by  the  fifth  commandment,  which,  while  it  deals  with 
human  relations,  deals  with  those  which  most  nearly 
resemble  the  relations  between  God  and  man.  Reverence 
for  God,  the  deliverer  and  forgiver  of  men,  is  the  sum  of 
the  commandments  which  precede ;  and  here  we  have 
inculcated  reverence  for  those  who  are,  under  God,  the 
source  of  life,  upon  whose  love  and  care  all,  at  their 
entrance  into  life,  are  so  absolutely  dependent.  Love  is 
not  commanded ;  because  in  such  relations  it  is  natural, 
and  moreover  it  cannot  be  produced  at  will.  But  reverence 
is ;  and  from  the  place  of  the  command,  manifestly  what 
is  required  is  something  of  that  same  awful  respect  which 
is  due  to  Yahweh  Himself  The  power  which  parents 
had  over  their  children  in  Israel  was  extensive,  though 
much  less  so  than  that  possessed,  for  example,  by  Roman 
parents.  A  father  could  sell  his  daughters  to  be  espoused 
as  subordinate  wives ;  ^   he   could   disallow  any  vows   a 

^  Exod.  xxi.  7» 


84  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

daughter  might  wish  to  take  upon  her ;  ^  and  both  parents 
could  bring  an  incorrigibly  rebellious  son  to  the  elders  of 
the  city  ^  and  have  him  stoned  publicly  to  death.  But, 
according  to  Moses,  the  main  restraining  forces  in  the 
home  should  be  love  and  reverence,  guarded  only  by  the 
solemn  sanction  of  death  to  the  openly  irreverent,  just  as 
reverence  for  Yahweh  was  guarded. 

There  was  here  nothing  of  the  sordid  view,  repudiated 
so  energetically  by  Jewish  scholars  like  Kalisch,^  that  we 
ought  "  to  weigh  and  measure  filial  affection  after  the  degree 
of  enjoyed  benefits."  No;  to  this  law  "the  relation 
between  parents  and  children  is  holy,  religious,  godly, 
not  of  a  purely  human  character " ;  and  it  is  a  mere  pro- 
fanation to  regard  it  as  we  in  modern  times  too  often  do. 
In  our  mad  pursuit  after  complete  individual  liberty  we 
have  fallen  back  into  a  moral  region  which  it  was  the 
almost  universal  merit  of  the  ancient  civilisations  to  have 
left  behind  them.  It  is  true,  certainly,  that  there  were 
reasons  for  this  advance  then  which  we  could  not  now 
recognise  without  falling  back  from  our  own  attainments 
in  other  directions ;  but  it  was  the  saving  salt  of  the 
ancient  civiHsations  that  the  parents  in  a  household  were 
surrounded  with  an  atmosphere  of  reverence,  which  made 
transgressions  against  them  as  rare  as  they  were  con- 
sidered horrible.  The  modern  freedom  may  in  favourable 
circumstances  produce  more  intimate  and  sympathetic 
intercourse  between  parents  and  children ;  but  in  the 
average  household  it  has  lowered  the  whole  tone  of  family 
life ;  and  it  threatens  sooner  or  later,  if  the  ancient  feeling 
cannot  be  restored,  to  destroy  the  family,  the  very  key- 
stone of  our  religion  and  civilisation.     This  commandment 

'  Numb.  XXX.  6. 
'  Deut.  xxi.  8. 

'  Kalisch,  Exodus,  p.  364  1 — yet  taught  in  all  Victorian  State  schools 
under  the  vicious  system  at  present  admitted. 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  85 

is  not  conditioned  on  the  question  whether  parents  have 
been  more  or  less  successful  in  giving  their  children  what 
they  desire,  or  whether  they  have  been  wise  and  unselfish 
in  their  dealing  with  their  children.  As  parents  they  have 
a  claim  upon  their  respect,  their  tenderness,  their  observ- 
ance, which  can  be  neglected  only  at  the  children's  peril. 
Even  the  average  parent  gives  quite  endless  thought  and 
care  to  his  children,  and  almost  unconsciously  falls  into 
the  habit  of  living  for  them.  That  brings  with  it  for  the 
children  an  indelible  obligation ;  and  along  with  the  new 
and  wiser  freedom  which  is  permitted  in  the  modern 
home,  this  reverence  should  grow,  just  as  the  love  and 
reverence  for  God  on  the  part  of  those  who  have  been 
made  the  free  children  of  God  through  Christ  ought  far 
to  exceed  that  to  which  the  best  of  the  Old  Testament 
saints  could  attain. 

Want  of  reverence  for  parents  is,  in  the  Decalogue, 
made  almost  one  with  want  of  reverence  toward  God,  and, 
in  the  case  of  this  human  duty  alone,  there  is  a  promise 
annexed  to  its  observance.  The  duty  runs  so  deep  into 
the  very  core  of  human  life,  that  its  fulfilment  brings  whole- 
someness  to  the  moral  nature  ;  this  health  spreads  into  the 
merely  physical  constitution,  and  long  life  becomes  the 
reward.  But  apart  from  the  quietude  of  heart  and  the 
power  of  self-restraint  which  so  great  a  duty  rightly 
fulfilled  brings  with  it,  we  must  also  suppose  that  in  a 
special  manner  the  blessing  of  God  does  rest  upon  dutiful 
children.  Even  in  the  modern  world,  amid  all  its  com- 
plexity, and  though  in  numberless  instances  it  may  seem 
to  have  been  falsified,  this  promise  verifies  itself  on  the 
large  scale.  In  the  less  complex  life  of  early  Israel  we 
may  well  believe  that  its  verification  was  even  more 
strikingly  seen.  In  both  ancient  and  modern  times, 
moreover,  the  human  conscience  has  leaped  up  to  justify 
the  belief  that  of  all  the  sins  committed  without  the  body 


86  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

this  is  the  most  heinous,  and  that  there  does  rest  upon  it 
in  a  pecuHar  manner  the  wrath  of  Almighty  God.     It  is 
a  blasphemy  against   love  in  its   earliest  manifestations 
to  the  soul,  and   only  by  answering  love  with  love  and 
reverence  can  there  be  any  fulfilling  of  the  law. 
/^     After  the  fifth,  the  commandments  deal  with  the  purely 
f      human  relations ;  but  in    coming  down   from   the   duties 
\     which  men  owe  to  God,  this  law  escapes  the  sordidness 
\  which   seems   to   creep   over  the  laws  of  other  nations, 
^  when   they  have  to  deal   with  the  rights  and  duties  of 
men.     The  human  rights  are  taken  up  rather  into  their 
relation  to  God,  and  cease  to  be  mere  matters  of  bargain 
and  arrangement.      They  are  viewed  entirely  from   the 
religious  and  moral  standpoint.     For  example,  the  destruc- 
tion  of  human  life,  which  in  most  cases  was  in  ancient 
times  dealt  with  by  private  law,  and   was  punished   by 
fines  or  money  payments,  is  here  regarded  solely  as  a  sin, 
an  act  forbidden  by  God.     The  will  of  a  holy  God  is  the 
source  of  these  prohibitions,  however  much  the  idea  of 
property  may  extend  in  them  beyond  the  limits  which  to 
us  now  seem  fitting.     They  begin  with  the  protection  of 
a  man's  life,  the  highest  of  his  possessions.     Next,  they 
prohibit  any  injury  to  him  through  his  wife,  who  next  to 
his  life  is  most  dear  to  him.     Then  property  in  our  modern 
sense  is  protected ;   and  lastly,  rising  out  of  the  merely 
physical  region,   the  ninth   commandment    prohibits    any 
attack  upon  a  man's  civil  standing   or  honour  by   false 
witness  concerning  him  in  the  courts  of  justice.     To  that 
crime   Easterns   are  prone  to  a  degree  which  Westerns, 
whom  Rome  has  trained  to  reverence  for  law,  can  hardly 
realise.      In  India,  at  this  hour,   false  witnesses  can   be 
purchased  in  the  open  market  at  a  trifling  price  ;  and  under 
native  government  the  whole  forces  of  civil  justice  become 
instruments   of    the   most    remediless   and    exasperating 
tyranny.     So  long  as  the  law  has  not  spoken  its  last  word 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  87 

against  the  innocent,  there  is  hope  of  remedy  ;  justice 
may  at  last  assert  itself.  But  when,  either  by  corrupt 
witnesses  or  by  a  corrupt  judge,  the  law  itself  inflicts  the 
wrong,  then  redress  is  impossible,  and  we  have  the 
oppression  which  drives  a  wise  man  mad.  Both  murder 
and  robbery,  moreover,  may  be  perpetrated  b^^  false 
swearing;  and  the  trust,  the  confidence  that  social  life 
demands,  is  utterly  destroyed  by  it. 

But  it  is  in  the  tenth  commandment  especially  that  this 
code  soars  most  completely  away  beyond  others.  In  four 
short  words  the  whole  region  of  neighbourly  duty,  so  far 
as  acts  are  concerned,  has  been  covered,  and  with  that 
other  codes  have  been  content.  But  the  laws  of  Yahweh 
must  cover  more  than  that.  Out  of  the  heart  proceed  all 
these  acts  which  have  been  forbidden,  and  Yahweh  takes 
knowledge  of  its  thoughts  and  intents.  The  covetous 
desire,  the  grasping  after  that  which  we  cannot  lawfully 
have,  that,  too,  is  absolutely  forbidden.  It  has  been 
pointed  out  that  the  first  commandment  also  deals  with 
the  thoughts.  "Thou  shalt  have  no  other  gods  before 
Me,"  separated  from  the  prohibition  of  idol-worship,  can 
refer  only  to  the  inward  adoration  or  submission  of  the 
heart.  And  in  this  last  commandment  also  it  is  the 
evil  desire,  the  lust  which  "  bringeth  forth  sin,"  which  is 
condemned.  In  its  beginning  and  ending,  therefore,  this 
code  transcends  the  limits  ordinarily  fixed  for  law;  it 
leads  the  mind  to  a  view  of  the  depth  and  breadth  of  the 
evil  that  has  to  be  coped  with,  which  the  other  precepts, 
taken  by  themselves  and  understood  in  their  merely  literal 
sense,  would  scarcely  suggest. 

This  fact  should  guard  us  against  the  common  fallacy 
that  Moses  and  the  people  of  his  day  could  not  have 
understood  these  commandments  in  any  sense  except  the 
barely  literal  one.  In  the  first  and  tenth  commandments 
there  is  involved  the  whole  teaching  of  our  Lord  that  he 


THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


that  hateth  his  brother  is  a  murderer.  The  evil  thought 
that  first  stirs  the  evil  desire  is  here  placed  on  the  same 
interdicted  level  as  the  evil  deed  ;  and  though  until  our 
Lord  had  spoken  none  had  seen  all  that  was  implied, 
yet  here  too  He  was  only  fulfilling,  bringing  to  perfection, 
that  which  the  law  as  given  by  Moses  had  first  outlined. 
With  this  in  view,  it  seems  difficult  to  justify  that  in- 
terpretation of  the  commandments  which  refuses  all  depth 
of  meaning  to  them.  The  initial  and  final  references  to 
the  inner  thoughts  of  men,  the  delicate  moral  perception 
which  puts  so  unerring  a  finger  on  the  sources  of  sin, 
show  that  such  literalism  is  out  of  place.  No  interpreta- 
tion can  do  this  law  justice  which  treats  it  superficially ; 
and  instead  of  feeling  safest  Vv^hen  we  find  least  in  these 
commandments,  we  should  welcome  from  them  all  the 
correction  and  reproof  which  a  reasonable  exegesis  will 
sustain. 

Some  of  those  who  adopt  the  other  view  do  so  in  the 
interests  of  the  authenticity  of  the  commandments.  They 
say.  We  must  be  careful  not  to  put  into  them  any  idea 
which  transcends  what  was  possible  in  the  days  of  Moses  ; 
otherwise  we  must  agree  with  those  who  bring  down  the 
date  of  these  marvellous  ten  words  to  the  middle  of  the 
seventh  century  B.C.  But  there  is  much  ground  for  dis- 
trusting modern  judgments  as  to  what  men  can  have 
thought  and  felt  in  earlier  and  ruder  stages  of  society. 
So  long  as  the  naroe  interpretation  of  the  state  of  man 
before  the  fall  prevailed,  which  Milton  has  made  so 
widely  popular,  the  tendency  was  to  exaggerate  the 
early  man's  moral  and  spiritual  attainments.  Now, 
when  the  most  degraded  savages  are  taken  as  the  truest 
representatives  of  primitive  man,  the  temptation  is  to 
minimise  both  unduly.  How  often  have  w^e  been  told, 
for  example,  that  the  Australian  is  the  lowest  of  man- 
kind, and  that  he  has  no  other  idea  of  a  spiritual  world 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  89 


than  that  when  he  dies  he  will  "jump  up"  a  white 
man  I  Yet  Mr.  A.  W.  Howitt,^  an  unexceptionable 
authority,  as  having  himself  been  "  initiated  "  among  the 
Australian  blacks,  tells  us  that  they  give  religious  and 
moral  instruction  to  their  boys  when  they  receive  the 
privileges  of  manhood.  His  words  are  :  ''  The  teachings 
of  the  initiation  are  in  a  series  of  '  moral  lessons,' 
pantomimically  displayed  in  a  manner  intended  to  be  so 
impressive  as  to  be  indelible.  There  is  clearly  a  belief 
in  a  Great  Spirit,  or  rather  an  anthropomorphic  Super- 
natural Being,  the  *  Master  of  all,'  whose  abode  is  above 
the  sky,  and  to  whom  are  attributed  powers  of  omnipotence 
and  omnipresence,  or,  at  any  rate,  the  power  'to  do 
anything  and  to  go  anywhere.'  The  exhibition  of  his 
image  to  the  novices,  and  the  magic  dances  round  it, 
approach  very  near  to  idol-worship.  The  wizards  who 
profess  to  communicate  with  him,  and  to  be  the  mediums 
of  communication  between  him  and  his  tribe,  are  not  far 
removed  from  an  organised  priesthood.  To  his  direct 
ordinance  are  attributed  the  spiritual  and  moral  laws 
of  the  community.  Although  there  is  no  worship  of 
Daramiilun,  as,  for  instance,  by  prayer,  yet  there  is  clearly 
an  invocation  of  him  by  name,  and  a  belief  that  certain 
acts  please  while  others  displease  him."  To  most  it 
would  have  seemed  absurd  to  attribute  religious  ideas  of 
such  a  kind  to  a  people  in  the  social  and  moral  condition 
of  the  Australian  aborigines.  Yet  here  we  have  the 
testimony  of  a  perfectly  competent  and  reliable  witness, 
who,  moreover,  has  no  personal  bias  in  favour  of  theologic 
notions,  to  prove  that  even  in  their  present  state  their 
theology  is  of  this  comparatively  advanced  kind. 

Many    critics    like    Stade,    and    even    Kuenen,    would 
deny  to   Israel  in   the  days  of  Moses  any  conception  of 

'  Journal  Anthropological  Instiiuie,  May  1884,  p.  28, 


90  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Yahweh  which  would  equal  the  Australian  conception  of 
Daramillun  !     Not  to  speak  of  the  "regrettable  vivacities" 
of  Ren  an  in  regard  to  Yahweh,   Kuenen  would  deny  to 
the    Mosaic  Yahweh  the  title  of  Lord  of  all ;   he  would 
deny    to    Him    the   power    "to  go  anywhere  and  to    do 
anything,"  binding  Him  strictly  to  His  tribe  and  His  land  ; 
he  would  make  His  priests  little  more  than  the  Australian 
wizards ;    and   purely   moral    laws    like    the    Decalogue 
Wellhausen  would  remove  to  a  late  date  mainly  because 
such    laws    transcend    the    limits    of    the    thought    and 
knowledge  of  the  Mosaic  time.     But  can  any  one  believe 
that  Israel  in  the  Mosaic  time  had  lower  beliefs  than  those 
of  the   Australian   aborigines  ?     In   every  other  respect 
they  had  left  far  behind  them  the   social  state   and  the 
merely  embryonic  culture  of  the  Australian  tribes.     Moses 
himself  is  an  irrefragable  proof  of  that.     No  such  man 
as  he  could  have  arisen  among  a  people  in  the  state  of 
the  Australians.     Even   the    fact    that  the   Hebrews   had 
lived    in    Egypt,   and    had   been   compelled   to   do    forced 
labour  for  a  long  series  of  years,  would  of  itself  have 
raised  them  to  a  higher  stage  of  culture.     Moreover  they 
built  houses,  and  owned  sheep  and  cattle,  and  must  have 
known    at    least    the    rudiments    of  agriculture.      Indeed 
Deut.  xi.  10  asserts  this,  and  the  testimony  of  travellers 
as  to  the  habits   of  the   tribes  in  the  wilderness  of  the 
wanderings    now    confirms  it.     Further,    they    had    been 
in   contact  with  Egyptian    religion,    and   they    had    been 
surrounded  by  cults  having  more  or  less  relation  to  the 
ancient  civilisations  of  Mesopotamia.     Under  such  circum- 
stances, even  apart  from  all  revelation,  it  could  not   be 
assumed  that  their  religious  ideas  must  needs  correspond 
to  modern  notions  of  the  low  type  of  primitive  religions. 
On  the  contrary,  nothing  but  the  clearest  proof  that  their 
religious    conceptions    were    so    surprisingly    low    should 
induce  us  to  believe  it.     On   any  supposition,  they  had 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  91 


in  the  Mosaic  time  the  first  germs  of  what  is  now 
universally  admitted  to  be  the  highest  form  of  religion. 
Can  we  believe  that  only  1 300  years  B.C.,  in  the  full  light 
of  history,  coming  out  of  a  land  where  the  religion  of  the 
people  had  been  systematised  and  elaborated,  not  for 
centuries,  but  for  millenniums,  and  only  600  years  before 
the  monotheistic  prophets,  a  people  at  such  a  stage 
of  civilisation  as  the  Hebrews  can  have  had  cruder 
notions  of  Deity  than  the  Wiraijuri  and  VVolgal  tribes 
of  New  South  Wales !  ^  It  may  have  been  so ;  but 
before  we  take  it  to  have  been  so,  we  have  a  right  to 
demand  evidence  of  a  stringent  kind,  evidence  which 
leaves  us  no  way  of  escape  from  a  conclusion  so 
improbable. 

Moreover  the  acceptance  of  the  view  now  opposed  does 
not  get  rid  of  the  necessity  for  supernatural  enlighten- 
ment in  Israel.  It  only  transfers  it  from  an  earlier  to 
a  later  time.  For  if  the  knowledge  of  Israel  in  Moses' 
day  was  below  the  Wolgal  standard,  then  it  would  seem 
inexplicable  that  the  ethical  monotheism  of  the  prophets 
should  have  grown  out  of  it  by  any  merely  natural  pro- 
cess. If  there  were  no  inspiration  before  the  prophets, 
though  they  believed  and  asserted  there  was,  then  their 
own  inspiration  only  becomes  the  more  marvellous.  It 
is  not  needful  to  deny  that  the  Hebrew  tribes  m.ay  at 
some  time  have  passed  through  the  low  stage  of  religious 
belief  of  which  these  writers  speak.  But  they  err  con- 
spicuously In  regarding  every  trace  of  animistic  and 
fetichistic  worship  which  can  be  unearthed  in  the 
language,  the  ceremonies,  and  the  habits  of  the  Hebrews 
at  the  Exodus,  as  evidence  of  the  highest  beliefs  of  the 
people  at  that  time.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  these  were 
probably  mere  survivals  of  a  state  of  thought  and  feehng 


See  Page  Renouf,  Hihbert  Lectures, 


92  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

then  either  superseded  or  in  the  process  of  being  so. 
Besides,  the  mass  of  any  people  always  lag  far  behind  the 
thoughts  and  aspirations  of  the  highest  thinkers  of  their 
nation  ;  and  if  we  admit  inspiration  at  all  as  a  factor  in 
the  religious  development  of  Israel,  the  distance  between 
what  Moses  taught  and  believed  himself,  and  what  he 
could  get  the  mass  of  the  people  to  believe  and  practise, 
must  have  been  still  greater.  If  he  gave  the  people  the 
ten  commandments,  he  must  have  been  far  above  them, 
and  dogmatic  assertions  as  to  what  he  can  have  thought 
and  believed  ought  to  be  abandoned. 

Granting,    however,    that   all   we    have   found   in    the 
Decalogue's   conception    of  Yahweh  was  present   to   the 
mind  of  Moses,  and  granting  that  the  commands  which 
deal   with    the    relations    of   micn  to  each   other    are   not 
mere  isolated   prohibitions,  but  are  founded  upon  moral 
principles   which   were    understood   even    then    to    have 
much  wider  implications,  there  still  remains  a  gap  between 
the  widest  meaning  that  early  time  could  put  into  them, 
and   that   which   Luther's   Catechism,  or   the   Catechism 
of  the  Westminster  Divines,  for  example,  asserts.     The 
question  therefore  arises  whether  these  wider  and  more 
detailed  explanations,  which  make   the  Decalogue  cover 
the    whole    field    of  the    moral    and    religious    life,    are 
legitimate,    and    if    so,    on    what    principle    can    they    be 
justified?     The    reply  would  seem    to    be  that  they  are 
legitimate,  and  that  the  ten  words  did  contain  much  more 
than  Moses  or  any  of  his  nation  for  many  centuries  after 
him  understood.     For  any  fruitful  thought,  any  thought 
which  really  penetrates  the  heart  of  things,  must  have  in 
it  wider  implications  than  the  first  thinker  of  it  can  have 
conceived.     If  by  any  means  a  man  has  had  insight  to 
see  the  central  fact  of  any  domain   of  thought  and  life, 
its  applications  will  not  be    Hmited  to  the  comparatively 
few  cases  to  v/hich  he  may  apply  it.     He  will  generally 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  93 

be  content  to  deduce  from  his  discovery  just  those 
conclusions  which  in  his  circumstances  and  in  his  day 
are  practically  useful  and  are  most  clamorously  de- 
manded. But  those  who  come  after,  pressed  by  new 
needs,  challenged  by  new  experiences,  and  enlightened 
by  new  thoughts  in  related  regions,  will  assuredly  find 
that  more  was  involved  in  that  first  step  than  any  one 
had  seen.  The  scope  of  the  fruitful  principle  will  thus 
inevitably  widen  with  the  course  of  things,  and  inferences 
undreamed  of  by  those  who  first  enunciated  the  principle 
will  be  securely  drawn  from  it  by  later  generations.  Now 
if  that  be  true  in  regard  to  truths  discovered  by  the 
unassisted  intellect  of  man,  how  much  more  true  will  it 
be  of  thoughts  which  have  first  been  revealed  to  man 
under  the  influence  of  inspiration  ?  Behind  the  human 
mind  which  received  them  and  applied  them  to  the 
circumstances  which  then  had  to  be  dealt  with,  there  is 
always  the  infinite  mind  which  sees  that 

'•  Far-off  Divine  event 
To  which  the  whole  creation  moves." 

The  Divine  purpose  of  the  revelation  must  be  the  true 
measure  of  the  thoughts  revealed,  and  the  Divine  purpose 
can  best  be  learned  by  studying  the  results  as  they  have 
actually  evolved  themselves  in  the  course  of  ages. 
Consequently,  while  the  fundamental  point  in  sound 
interpretation  of  a  book  such  as  the  Bible  is  to  ascertain  y^rs^ 
what  the  statements  made  therein  signified  to  those  who 
heard  them  first,  the  second  point  is  not  to  shut  the  mind  to 
the  wider  and  more  extensive  applications  of  them  which 
the  thought  and  experience  of  men,  taught  by  the  course 
of  history,  have  been  induced,  or  even  compelled,  to  make. 
Both  the  narrower  and  the  wider  meanings  are  there, 
and  were  meant  to  be  found  there.  No  exposition  which 
ignores  either  can  be  adequate. 

That  all  works  of  God  are  to  be  dealt  with  in  this  way 


94  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

is  beautifully  demonstrated  by  Ruskin  (Fors  Clavigera, 
Vol.  I.,  Letter  V.).  In  criticising  the  statement  of  a 
botanist  that  ^' there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  flower,"  after 
admitting  that  in  a  certain  sense  the  lecturer  was  right, 
he  goes  on  to  say :  **  But  in  the  deepest  sense  of  all, 
he  was  to  the  extremity  of  wrongness  wrong;  for  leaf 
and  root  and  fruit  exist,  all  of  them,  only — that  there  may 
be  flowers.  He  disregarded  the  life  and  passion  of  the 
creature,  which  were  its  essence.  Had  he  looked  for 
these,  he  would  have  recognised  that  in  the  thought  of 
nature  herself,  there  is,  in  a  plant,  nothing  else  but 
flowers."  That  means,  of  course,  that  the  final  perfec- 
tion of  a  development  is  the  real  and  final  meaning  of  it 
all.  Now  any  thought  given  by  God  in  this  special 
manner  which  we  call  "inspiration"  has  in  it  a  manifold 
and  varied  life,  and  an  end  in  view,  which  God  alone 
foresees.  It  works  like  leaven,  it  grows  like  a  seed.  It 
is  supremely  living  and  powerful ;  and  though  it  may 
have  begun  its  life,  like  the  mustard  seed,  in  a  small  and 
lowly  sphere,  it  casts  out  branches  on  all  sides  till  its 
entire  allotted  space  is  filled.  So  in  the  Decalogue  ;  the 
central  chord  in  all  the  matters  dealt  with  has  been 
touched  with  Divine  skill,  and  all  that  has  further  to  be 
revealed  or  learned  on  that  matter  must  lie  in  the  line 
of  the  first  announcement. 

It  is  not,  therefore,  an  illegitimate  extension  of  the 
meaning  of  the  first  commandment  to  say  that  it  teaches 
monotheism,  nor  of  the  second  that  it  teaches  the  spiritu- 
ality of  God,  nor  of  the  seventh  that  it  forbids  all 
sensuality  in  thought  or  word  or  deed.  It  is  true  that 
probably  only  the  separateness  of  God  was  originally  seen 
to  be  asserted  in  the  first,  and  the  words  may  possibly 
have  been  understood  to  mean  that  the  "other  gods" 
referred  to  had  some  kind  of  actual  life.  The  second, 
too,   may  have  seemed  to   be   fulfilled  when   no  earthly 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  95 

thing  that  was  made  by  man  was  taken  to  represent 
Yahweh.  Lastly,  those  who  say  that  nothing  is  forbidden 
in  the  seventh  commandment  but  hteral  adultery  have 
much  to  say  for  themselves.  In  a  polygamous  society 
concubinage  always  exists.  The  absence  of  the  more 
flagrant  of  what  in  monogamous  societies  are  called  social 
evils  does  not  in  the  least  imply  the  superior  morality,  such 
as  many  who  wish  to  disparage  our  Christian  civilisa- 
tion have  ascribed,  for  instance,  to  Mohammedans.  The 
degraded  class  of  women  who  are  the  reproach  and  the 
despair  of  our  large  towns  are  not  so  frequent  in  those 
societies,  because  all  women  are  degraded  to  nearer  their 
level  than  in  monogamous  lands.  Both  lust  and  vice  are 
more  prevalent :  and  they  are  so  because  the  whole  level 
of  thought  and  feeling  in  regard  to  such  matters  is  much 
lower  than  with  us. 

Now,  undoubtedly,  ancient  Israel  was  no  exception  to 
this  rule.  In  it,  as  a  polygamous  nation,  there  was  a 
licence  in  regard  to  sexual  relations  with  women  who 
were  neither  married  nor  betrothed  which  would  be 
impossible  now  in  any  Christian  community.  It  may  be, 
therefore,  that  only  the  married  woman  was  specially 
protected  by  this  law.  But  in  none  of  these  cases  did 
the  more  rudimentary  conception  of  the  scope  of  the 
commandments  last.  By  imperceptible  steps  the  sweep 
of  them  widened,  until  finally  the  last  consequences  were 
deduced  from  them,  and  they  were  seen  to  cover  the 
whole  sphere  of  human  duty.  It  may  have  been  a  long 
step  from  the  prohibition  to  put  other  gods  along  with 
Yahweh  to  St.  Paul's  decisive  word  "An  idol  is  nothing 
in  the  world,"  but  the  one  was  from  the  first  involved  in 
the  other.  Between  ''Thou  shalt  not  make  unto  thee  a 
graven  image  "  and  our  Lord's  declaration  "  God  is  a  Spirit, 
and  must  be  worshipped  in  spirit  and  in  truth,"  there  lies 
a  long  and  toilsome  upward  movement ;  but  the  first  was 


96  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  gate  into  the  path  which  must  end  in  the  second. 
Similarly,  the  commandment  which  affirmed  so  strongly 
the  sacredness  of  the  family,  by  hedging  round  the  house- 
mother with  this  special  defence  held  implicit  in  it  all 
that  rare  and  lovely  purity  which  the  best  type  of  Chris- 
tian women  exhibit.  The  principles  upon  which  the 
initial  prohibitions  were  founded  were  true  to  fact  and  to 
the  nature  both  of  God  and  man.  They  were,  therefore, 
never  found  at  fault  in  the  advancing  stages  of  human 
experience  ;  and  the  meaning  which  a  modern  congregation 
of  Christians  finds  in  these  solemn  ''words,"  when  they 
are  read  before  them,  is  as  truly  and  justly  their  meaning 
as  the  more  meagre  interpretation  which  alone  ancient 
Israel  could  put  upon  them. 

How  gradually,  and  how  naturally,  the  advancing 
thoughts  and  changed  circumstances  of  Israel  affected  the 
Decalogue  may  be  seen  most  clearly  in  the  differences 
between  its  form  as  originally  given,  and  as  it  is  set  forth 
in  Exodus  and  in  Deuteronomy.  If  the  original  form  of 
these  commandments  was  what  we  have  indicated  (p.  69), 
they  corresponded  entirely  to  the  circumstances  of  the 
wilderness.  There  is  no  reference  in  them  which  pre- 
supposes any  other  social  background  than  that  of  a 
people  dwelling  together  according  to  families,  possessing 
property,  and  worshipping  Yahweh.  None  of  the  com- 
mandments involves  a  social  state  different  from  that. 
But  when  Israel  had  entered  upon  its  heritage,  and  had 
become  possessed  of  the  oxen  and  asses  which  were 
needed  in  agricultural  labour  and  in  settled  life,  this  stage 
of  their  progress  was  reflected  in  the  reasons  and  induce- 
ments which  were  added  to  the  original  commands.  In 
the  fourth  and  tenth  commandments  of  Exodus  we  have 
consequently  the  essential  commandments  of  the  earlier 
day  adapted  to  a  new  state  of  things,  i.e.  to  a  settled 
agricultural  life.     Then,  even  as  between  the  Exodus  and 


THE  DECALOGUE-ITS  SUBSTANCE  97 

Deuteronomic  texts,  a  progress  is  perceptible.  The  reasons 
for  keeping  the  Sabbath  which  these  two  recensions  give 
are  different,  as  we  have  seen,  and  it  is  probable  that  the 
reason  given  in  Deuteronomy  was  first.  To  the  people 
in  the  wilderness  came  the  bare  Divine  command  that  this 
one  day  was  to  be  sacred  to  Yahweh.  In  both  Exodus 
and  Deuteronomy  we  have  additions,  going  into  details 
which  show  that  when  these  versions  were  prepared  Israel 
had  ceased  to  be  nomadic  and  had  become  agricultural. 
In  Deuteronomy  we  find  that  the  importance  and  useful- 
ness of  this  command  from  a  humane  point  of  view  had 
been  recognised,  and  one  at  least  of  the  grounds  upon 
which  it  should  be  held  a  point  of  morality  to  keep  it  is 
set  forth  in  the  words  "  that  thy  manservant  and  thy 
maidservant  may  rest  as  well  as  thou."  Finally,  if  the 
critical  views  be  correct,  in  Exodus  we  have  the  motive 
for  the  observance  of  the  Sabbath  raised  to  the  universal 
and  eternal,  by  being  brought  into  connection  with  the 
creative  activity  of  God. 

If  the  progression  now  traced  out  be  real,  then  we  have 
in  it  a  classical  instance  of  the  manner  in  which  Divine 
commands  were  given  and  dealt  with  in  Israel.  Given  in 
the  most  general  form  at  first,  they  inevitably  open  the 
way  for  progress,  and  as  thought  and  experience  grow  in 
volume  and  rise  in  quality,  so  does  the  understanding  of 
the  law  as  given  expand.  Under  the  influence  of  this 
expansion  addition  after  addition  is  made,  till  the  final 
form  is  reached ;  and  the  whole  is  then  set  forth  as  having 
been  spoken  by  Yahweh  and  given  by  Moses  when  the 
command  was  first  promulgated.  In  such  cases  literary 
proprietorship  was  never  in  question.  Each  addition  was 
sanctioned  by  revelation,  and  those  by  whom  it  came  were 
never  thought  of.  It  would  seem,  indeed,  that  nothing  but 
modern  sceptical  views  as  to  the  reality  of  revelation,  the 
feeling  that  all  this  movement  to  a  higher  faith  was  merely 

7 


98  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

natural,  and  that  the  hand  of  God  was  not  in  it,  could 
have  suggested  to  the  ancient  Hebrew  writers  the  wish 
to  hand  on  the  names  of  those  by  whom  such  changes 
were  made.  Yahweh  spoke  at  the  beginning,  Moses 
mediated  between  the  people  and  Yahweh,  and  the  law 
thus  mediated  was  in  all  forms  equally  Mosaic,  and  in  all 
forms  equally  Divine. 

One  other  thing  remains  to  be  noticed,  and  that  is  the 
prevailingly  negative  form  of  the  commandments.  Of 
the  ten  only  the  fourth  and  fifth  are  in  the  affirmative. 
All  the  others  are  prohibitions,  and  we  who  have  been 
taught  by  Christianity  to  put  emphasis  upon  the  positive 
aspects  of  duty  as  the  really  important  aspects  of  it, 
may  not  improbably  feel  chilled  and  repelled  by  a 
moral  code  which  so  definitely  and  prevailingly  forbids. 
But  the  cause  of  this  is  plain.  A  code  like  that  of  the 
Twelve  Tables  published  in  early  Rome  is  only  occasion- 
ally negative,  because  it  rises  to  no  great  height  in  its 
demands,  and  is  intent  only  upon  ordering  the  Hfe  of  the 
citizens  in  their  outward  conduct.  But  this  code,  which 
seeks  to  raise  the  whole  of  life  into  the  sacredness  of  a 
continual  service  of  God  and  man,  must  forbid,  because 
the  first  condition  of  such  a  life  is  the  renunciation  and 
the  restriction  of  self.  Benevolent  dreamers  and  theorists 
of  all  ages,  and  men  of  the  world  whose  moral  standard 
is  merely  the  attainment  of  the  average  man,  have  denied 
the  evil  tendency  in  man's  nature.  They  have  asserted 
that  man  is  born  good ;  but  the  facts  of  experience  are 
entirely  against  them.  Whenever  a  serious  effort  has 
been  made  to  raise  man  to  any  conspicuous  height  of 
moral  goodness,  it  has  been  found  necessary  to  forbid  him 
to  follow  the  bent  of  his  nature.  "  Thou  shalt  not  "  has 
been  the  prevailing  formula;  and  in  this  sense  original 
sin  has  always  been  witnessed  to  in  the  world.  Hence 
the  Old  Testament,  in  which  the  most  strenuous  conflict 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  99 

for  goodness  which  the  world  in  those  ages  knew  was 
being  carried  on,  could  not  fail,  in  every  part  of  it,  to 
proclaim  that  man  is  not  born  good.  However  late  we 
may  be  compelled  to  put  the  writing  of  the  story  of  the 
fall  as  it  stands  in  Genesis,  there  can  be  no  question  that 
it  represents  the  view  of  the  Old  Testament  at  all  times. 
Man  is  fallen ;  he  is  not  what  he  ought  to  be,  and  the 
evil  taint  is  handed  on  from  one  generation  to  another. 
Every  generation,  therefore,  is  called,  by  prophet  and 
priest  and  lawgiver  alike,  to  the  conflict  against  the 
natural  man. 

The  truth  is  that  all  along  the  leaders  of  Israel  had  a 
quite  overawing  sense  of  the  moral  greatness  of  Yahweh 
and  of  the  stringency  of  His  demands  upon  them.  "  Be 
ye  holy,  for  I  am  holy,"  was  His  demand  ;  and  so  among 
this  people,  as  among  no  other,  the  sense  of  sin  was 
heightened,  till  it  embittered  life  to  all  who  seriously  took 
to  heart  the  religion  they  professed.  This  feeling  sought 
relief  in  expiatory  sacrifices,  like  the  sin  offering  and 
the  guilt  offering ;  but  in  vain.  It  then  led  to  Pharisaic 
hedging  of  the  law,  to  seeking  a  positive  precept  for 
every  moment  of  time,  to  binding  upon  men's  consciences 
the  most  minute  and  burdensome  prescriptions,  as  a 
means  of  making  them  what  they  must  be  if  they  were 
to  meet  the  Divine  requirements.  But  that  too  failed. 
It  became  a  slavery  so  intolerable  that,  when  St.  Paul 
received  the  power  of  a  new  life,  his  predominant  feeling 
was  that  for  the  first  time  he  knew  what  liberty  meant. 
He  was  set  free  from  both  the  bondage  of  sin  and  the 
bondage  of  ritual. 

To  the  religious  man  of  the  Old  Testament  life  was 
a  conflict  against  evil  tendencies,  a  conflict  in  which  de* 
feat  was  only  too  frequent,  but  from  which  there  was  no 
discharge.  It  was  fitting,  therefore,  that  at  the  very  be- 
ginning  of   Israel's   history,  as  the  people   of  God,  this 


100  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

stern  prohibition  of  the  rougher  manifestations  of  the 
natural  man  should  stand. 

But  it  is  characteristic  of  the  Old  Testament  that 
it  states  the  fundamental  fact,  without  any  of  the  over- 
refinements  and  exaggerations  by  which  later  doctrinal 
developments  have  discredited  it.  There  is  no  appearance 
here,  or  anywhere  in  the  Old  Testament,  of  the  Lutheran 
exaggeration  that  man  is  by  nature  impotent  to  all  good, 
as  a  stock  or  a  stone  is.  Keeping  close  to  the  testimony 
of  the  universal  conscience,  the  Decalogue,  and  the  Old 
Testament  generally,  speaks  to  men  as  those  who  can 
be  otherwise  if  they  will.  There  is,  further,  a  robust 
assertion  of  righteous  intention  and  righteous  act  on  the 
part  of  those  whose  minds  are  set  to  be  faithful  to  God. 
This  may  have  been  partly  due  to  a  blunter  feeling  in 
regard  to  sin,  and  a  less  highly  developed  conscience, 
but  it  was  mainly  a  healthy  assertion  of  facts  which 
ought  not  to  be  ignored.  Yet,  with  all  that,  original  sin 
was  too  plain  a  fact  ever  to  be  denied  by  the  healthy- 
minded  saints  of  the  Old  Testament.  Fundamentally, 
they  held  that  human  nature  needed  to  be  restrained,  its 
innate  lawlessness  needed  to  be  curbed,  before  it  could 
be  made  acceptable  to  God. 

Among  the  heathen  nations  that  was  not  so.  Take  the 
Greeks,  for  instance,  as  the  highest  among  them.  Their 
watchword  in  morals  was  not  repression,  but  harmonious 
development.  Every  impulse  of  human  nature  was  right, 
and  had  the  protection  of  a  deity  peculiarly  its  own. 
Restraint,  such  as  the  Israelite  felt  to  be  his  first 
need,  would  have  been  regarded  as  mutilation  by  the 
Greek,  for  he  was  dominated  by  no  higher  ideal  than 
that  of  a  fully  developed  man.  There  was  no  vision 
of  unattainable  holiness  hovering  always  before  his 
mind,  as  there  was  before  the  mind  of  the  Israelite. 
God   had   not   revealed    Himself  to   him   in   power   and 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  loi 

unalloyed  purity,  with  a  background  of  infinite  wisdom 
and  omnipotence,  so  that  unearthly  love  and  goodness 
were  seen  to  be  guiding  and  ruling  the  world.  As 
a  consequence,  the  calling  and  destiny  of  man  were 
conceived  by  the  Greeks  in  a  far  less  soaring  fashion 
than  by  Israel.  To  put  the  difference  in  a  few  words, 
man,  harmoniously  developed  in  all  his  powers  and 
passions  and  faculties,  with  nothing  excessive  about  him, 
was  made  God  by  the  Greeks;  whereas  in  Israel  God  was 
brought  down  into  human  life  to  bear  man's  burden  and 
to  supply  the  strength  needed  that  man  might  become 
like  God  in  truth  and  mercy  and  purity.  It  is  of  course 
true  that  both  conceived  of  God  under  human  categories. 
They  could  not  conceive  God  save  by  attributing  to  Him 
that  which  they  looked  upon  as  highest  in  man.  It  is 
also  true  that  the  higher  natures  in  both  nations,  starting 
thus  differently,  did  in  much  approach  each  other.  Still, 
the  immense  difference  remains,  that  the  impulse  in  the 
one  case  was  given  from  the  earth  by  dreams  of  human 
perfection,  in  the  other  it  came  from  above  through  men 
who  had  seen  God.  The  Greeks  had  seen  only  the  glory 
of  man  ;  Israel  had  seen  the  glory  of  God. 

The  result  was  that  human  nature  as  it  is  seemed  to 
the  one  much  more  worthy  of  respect  and  much  less 
seriously  compromised  than  it  did  to  the  other.  Comparing 
man  as  he  is,  only  with  man  as  he  easily  might  be,  the 
Greeks  took  a  much  less  serious  view  of  his  state  than 
the  Hebrews,  who  compared  him  with  God  as  He  had 
revealed  Himself.  The  former  never  attained  any  clear 
conception  of  sin,  and  regarded  it  as  a  passing  weakness 
which  could  without  much  trouble  be  overcome.  The 
latter  saw  that  it  was  a  radical  and  now  innate  want  of 
harmony  with  God,  which  could  only  be  cured  by  a  new 
life  being  breathed  into  man  from  above.  And  when 
Europe  became  Christian,  this  difference  made  itself  felt 


102  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

in  very  widespread  religious  and  theological  diver- 
gences. In  the  South  and  among  the  Latin  races  the  less 
strenuous  view  of  human  disabilities — the  view  which 
naturally  grew  out  of  the  heathen  conception  of  man 
as,  on  the  whole,  born  good,  with  no  very  arduous  moral 
heights  to  scale — has  prevailed,  and  in  those  regions  the 
Pelagian  form  of  doctrine  has  mastered  the  Christian 
Church.  But  the  Teutonic  races  have,  in  this  matter, 
shown  a  remarkable  affinity  with  the  Hebrew  mind  and 
teaching.  The  deeper  and  more  tragic  view  of  the  state 
of  man  has  commended  itself  to  the  Teutonic  mind,  and 
the  depth  of  the  moral  taint  in  the  natural  man  has  been 
estimated  according  to  the  Biblical  standard.  It  is  not 
only  theologians  among  the  Northern  races  who  have  been 
thus  affected.  The  higher  imaginative  literature  of  England 
gives  the  same  impression  ;  and  in  our  own  day  Browning, 
our  greatest  poet,  has  emphasised  his  acceptance  of  the 
Augustinian  view  of  human  nature  by  making  its  teaching 
as  to  original  sin  a  proof  of  the  truth  of  Christianity.^ 
At  the  end  of  his  poem  "  Gold  Hair  :  a  Story  of  Pornic," 
in  which  he  tells  how  a  girl  of  angelic  beauty,  and  of 
angelic  purity  of  nature  as  was  supposed,  is  found  after 
her  death  to  have  sold  her  soul  to  the  most  gruesome 
avarice,  he  says  : — 

"The  candid  incline  to  surmise  of  late 
That  the  Christian  faith  may  be  false,  I  find ; 
For  our  Essays  and  Reviews'  debate 
Begins  to  tell  on  the  public  mind, 
And  Colenso's  words  have  weight : 

I  still,  to  suppose  it  true,  for  my  part, 

See  reasons  and  reasons  ;  this,  to  begin  : 

'Tis  the  faith  that  launched  point-blank  her  dart 

At  the  head  of  a  lie — taught  original  sin, 

The  corruption  of  man's  heart." 

'  Browning's  Poetical  Works,  vol.  vi,,  p.  69. 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  103 

But  the  Pagan  view  always  reasserts  itself ;  and  modern 
Hellenists  especially,  in  their  admiration  of  the  grace 
which  does  undoubtedly  go  with  such  conceptions  of  good- 
ness as  the  Greeks  could  attain,  are  apt  to  look  askance 
at  the  harshness  and  strenuousness  which  they  find  in  the 
Old  Testament.  For  the  most  pathetic  and  pure  of  the 
Greek  conceptions  of  the  gods  are  those  which,  like 
Demeter,  embody  mother's  love  or  some  other  natural 
glory  of  humanity.  Being  thus  natural,  they  are  set  be- 
fore us  by  the  Greek  imagination  with  an  unconstrained 
and  graceful  beauty  which  makes  goodness  appeal  to  the 
sesthetic  sense.  To  do  this  seems  to  many  the  supreme 
achievement.  Without  this  they  hold  that  Christianity 
would  fail  to  meet  the  requirements  of  the  modern  heart 
and  mind,  for  to  interest  "  taste  "  on  the  side  of  goodness  is, 
apparently,  better  than  to  let  men  feel  the  compulsion  of 
duty.  Reasoning  on  such  premisses,  they  claim  that  Greek 
religion  gave  to  Christianity  its  completion  and  its  crown. 
This  is  the  claim  advanced  by  Dyer  in  his  Gods  of  Greece 
(p.  19).  *' The  Greek  poets  and  philosophers,"  he  says, 
"  are  among  our  intellectual  progenitors,  and  therefore  the 
religion  of  to-day  has  requirements  which  include  all  that 
the  noblest  Greeks  could  dream  of,  requirements  which 
the  aspirations  of  Israel  alone  could  not  satisfy.  Our 
complex  life  had  need,  not  only  of  a  supreme  God  of 
power,  universal  and  irresistible,  of  a  jealous  God  beside 
whom  there  was  no  other  God,  but  also  of  a  God  of  love 
and  grace  and  purity.  To  these  ideal  qualities,  present  in 
the  Diviner  godhead  of  the  Gospels,  the  evolution  of  Greek 
mythology  brought  much  that  satisfies  our  hearts."  The 
best  answer  to  that  is  to  read  Deuteronomy.  The 
Hebrews  had  no  need  to  borrow  "  a  God  of  love  and 
grace  and  purity "  from  Greek  mythology.  Centuries 
before  they  came  in  contact  with  Greeks,  their  inspired 
men  had  painted  the  love  and  grace  and  purity  of  God  in 


104  'm^  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  most  attractive  colours.  Nor  did  they  ever  need  to 
unlearn  the  belief  that  Yahweh  was  merely  a  supreme 
God  of  power.  In  the  course  of  our  exposition  we  shall 
have  occasion  to  see  that  the  worship  of  mere  power  was 
superseded  by  the  religion  of  Yahweh  from  the  first,  and 
that  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  gives  his  whole  strength 
to  demonstrate  that  the  God  of  Israel  is  a  "  God  of  love 
and  grace  and  purity."  But  perhaps  "  grace  "  means  to 
Mr.  Dyer  "  gracefulness."  In  that  case  we  would  deny 
that  ''the  Diviner  godhead  of  the  Gospels,"  as  revealed  in 
Jesus  Christ,  had  that  aesthetic  quality  either.  There  is 
no  word  of  an  appeal  to  the  sense  of  the  artistically 
beautiful  in  anything  recorded  of  Him ;  but  neither  in  the 
Old  Testament  nor  the  New  is  there  any  want  of  moral 
beauty  in  the  representation  given  of  God.  Moral  beauty 
alone  has  a  central  place  in  religion ;  and  when  beauty 
that  appeals  to  the  senses  intrudes  into  religion,  it  becomes 
a  source  of  weakness  rather  than  of  strength.  There  may 
be  a  few  people  who  can  trust  to  their  taste  to  keep  them 
firm  in  the  pursuit  of  goodness,  but  the  bulk  of  men  have 
always  needed,  and  will  always  need,  the  severer  compul- 
sion of  duty.  They  need  an  objective  standard ;  they  need 
a  God,  the  embodiment  and  enforcer  of  all  that  duty 
demands  of  them ;  and  when  they  bend  themselves  to  the 
yoke  of  obligation  thus  imposed,  they  enter  into  a  world 
of  heavenly  beauty  which  seizes  and  enraptures  the  soul. 
The  mere  aesthetic  beauty  of  Greek  mythology  pales,  for 
the  more  earnest  races  of  mankind  at  least,  before  this 
Diviner  loveliness,  and  it  is  the  special  gift  of  the  Hebrew 
as  well  as  of  the  Teutonic  races  to  be  sensitive  to  it, 
just  as  they  fall  behind  others  in  aesthetic  sensitiveness. 
Wordsworth  felt  this,  and  has  expressed  it  inimitably  in 
his  ''  Ode  to  Duty  "— 

"  Stern  Lawgiver !  yet  Thou  dost  wear 
The  Godhead's  most  benignant  grace 


THE  DECALOGUE— ITS  SUBSTANCE  105 

Nor  know  we  anything  so  fair 
As  is  the  smile  upon  Thy  face." 

That  expresses  the  Hebrew  feehng  also.  Drawn  upwards 
by  the  infinite  and  unchangeable  love  and  goodness  of 
Yahweh,  the  Hebrews  felt  the  clog  of  their  innate  sin- 
fulness as  no  other  race  has  done.  The  stern  '^  thou  shalt 
nots  "  of  the  Decalogue  consequently  found  an  echo  in 
their  hearts.  Won  by  the  beauty  of  holiness,  they  gladly 
welcomed  the  discipline  of  the  Divine  law,  and  by  doing 
so  they  established  human  goodness  on  a  foundation 
immeasurably  more  stable  than  any  the  gracefulness  of 
Greek  imaginations  could  hope  to  lay. 


CHAPTER    VI 

THE  MEDIATORSHIP   OF  MOSES 
Deut.  v.  22-33 

AFTER  the  ten  commandments,  Deuteronomy,  like 
Exodus,  next  indicates  that  for  all  of  legislation, 
L exhortation,  and  advice  that  follows,  Moses  was  to  be  the 
mediator  between  God  and  the  people.  He  is  represented 
as  Yahweh's  prophet  or  speaker  in  all  that  succee^is-}  the 
Decalogue  alone  is  set  forth  as  the  direct  Divine  command. 
Evidently  a  great  distinction  is  here  notified,  and  what  it 
exactly  was  may  be  best  explained  by  reference  to  the 
history  of  Roman  law.  In  the  earliest  times  that  con- 
sisted of  Fas,  Jus,  a.nd  Jus  moribus  constitutum.  In  Chapter 
IV.  Professor  Muirhead's  description  oi fas  has  been  given 
at  length,  so  that  we  need  not  repeat  it  here.  The  point 
to  remember  is  that  it  consisted  of  universal  precepts  such 
as  the  Decalogue  contains,  given  direct  by  God.  Jus 
again  was,  according  to  Breal,  the  Divine  will  declared  by 
human  agency,  and  it  occupied  much  the  position  which  law 
does  in  civilised  states  now.  Finally,  jus  moribus  constitu- 
tum, or  boni  mores,  was  customary  law,  which  had  a  twofold 
function.  "  It  was  (i)  a  restraint  upon  the  law,  condemning, 
though  it  could  not  prevent,  the  ruthless  and  unnecessary 
exercise  of  legal  right.  (2)  It  was  a  supplement  to  law 
(Jus),  requiring  things  law  did  not,  e.g.  dutiful  service, 
respect  and  obedience,  chastity,  fideHty  to  engagements, 
etc."    Now  it  is  a  striking  fact  that,  though  there  can  be  no 

106 


V.  22-33-]  THE  MEDIATORSHIP   OF  MOSES  107 

question  of  imitation  here,  the  legislation  of  Deuteronomy 
falls  naturally  into  these  very  divisions  ;  and  that  fact  of 
itself  gives  strong  support  to  the  belief  that  here  in  Israel, 
as  there  in  Rome,  we  have  the  recorded  facts  of  the  earliest 
efforts  at  the  regulation  of  national  life.  The  fas,  then, 
corresponds  to  the  Decalogue.  The  jus  runs  exactly 
parallel  with  the  laws  in  the  strict  sense  of  the  term, 
those  which  Moses  received  from  Yahweh  and  afterwards 
promulgated.  Lastly,  the  boni  mores  are  represented  in 
Deuteronomy  by  those  beautiful  precepts  which  limited 
the  exercise  of  legal  right,  and,  going  far  beyond  law, 
demanded  of  Israel  that  they  should  make  good  their 
claim  to  be  Yahweh's  people  by  justice,  charity,  and 
purity. 

To  some  it  may  seem  that  we  do  no  service  to 
Scripture  by  insisting  upon  such  a  parallel.  They  will 
feel  as  if  thereby  the  unique  character  of  the  religion  of 
Israel  as  a  revealed  religion  were  obscured,  if  not  obliter- 
ated. But  nothing  can  be  imagined  which  could  confirm 
us  in  belief  of  the  substantial  accuracy  of  what  we  find 
narrated  of  early  times  in  Scripture,  more  than  the 
discovery  that,  without  any  possibility  of  collusion,  the 
earliest  records  of  civilisation  elsewhere  give  us  precisely 
the  same  account  of  the  forms  in  which  law  first  makes 
its  appearance.  Surely  we  ought  now  to  have  learned  this 
lesson  at  least,  that  it  is  no  disparagement  to  a  Divinely 
given  system  of  law  and  religion,  that  its  growth  and 
development  run  in  the  same  channels  as  the  growth  and 
development  of  similar  systems  which  have  none  of  the 
marks  of  a  Divine  origin.  Revelation  always  seizes  upon 
mind  as  it  is,  and  makes  that  a  sufficient  and  effective 
channel  for  itself.  However  it  is  to  be  explained,  it  is 
true  that  Divine  action  generally  seeks  to  hide  itself  in  the 
ordinary  course  of  human  things  as  quickly  as  possible.  It 
is  only  at  the  moment  of  contact,  or  at  the  moment  when  it 


io8  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

has  burst  forth  in  some  flower  of  more  than  earthly  grace 
and  lovehness,  or  when  it  has  overturned  and  overturned 
until  that  state  of  things  which  has  a  right  to  endure 
has  been  attained,  that  the  Divine  force  reveals  itself. 
For  the  most  part  it  sinks  into  the  general  sum  of  forces 
that  are  making  for  the  progress  of  humanity,  and  clothes 
itself  gladly  in  the  uniform  of  other  beneficent  but  natural 
influences.  Consequently  it  ought  to  be  a  welcome  fact 
that  so  close  a  parallel  exists  between  the  origins  of 
Roman  law  and  the  origins  of  Hebrew  law.  The  one 
great  gain  already  mentioned,  that  it  explains  the  early 
appearance  of  the  Decalogue,  and  shows  that  some  such 
laws  would  naturally  be  among  the  primary  laws  of  Israel, 
would  be  sufficient  to  justify  that  view ;  while  in  addition 
the  distinctions  from  the  early  laws  of  Rome  help  us  to 
classify  in  clear  broad  masses  the  somewhat  disordered 
series  of  Deuteronomic  laws. 

On  one  point  only  does  the  parallel  seem  questionable. 
If  we  followed  it  alone  as  our  guide,  we  should  have  to 
set  down  the  mediatorship  of  Moses,  as  a  mere  part  of  the 
method,  as  belonging  to  the  formal  side  only  of  the  great 
revelation.  In  other  words,  we  should  have  to  ask 
whether  the  statement  we  have  in  Deut.  v.  22-30  is 
only  an  emotional  and  pictorial  way  of  setting  forth  the 
fact  that,  following  and  supplementing  the  elementary  and 
Divinely  given  Hebrew  fas,  there  was  also  a  Divinely 
given  but  humanly  mediated  jus.  But  clearly  it  means 
much  more  than  that.  By  the  earlier  prophets,  and 
generally  in  all  earlier  delineations  of  him,  Moses  is 
regarded  as  a  prophet  who  had  more  direct  and  continuous 
access  to  the  Divine  presence  than  any  other  prophet  of 
Israel.  Moreover  he  had  always  been  represented  from 
the  earliest  times  as  standing  between  Yahweh  and  His 
people,  holding  on  to  the  one  and  refusing  to  let  the  other 
go.     In   the  great   scene,    taken    from    the    earliest   con- 


V.  22-33]  THE  MEDIATORSHIP   OF  MOSES  109 

stituents  of  the  Pentateuch  and  narrated  in  Exod.  xxxii., 
we  see  him  anticipating  by  centuries  the  wonderful  picture 
of  the  Servant  of  God  in  Isa.  Hii.,  and  by  a  still  more 
amazing  stretch  of  time,  that  Divinest  wish  of  St.  Paul, 
that  he  himself  might  be  accursed  even  from  Christ  for  his 
brethren's  sake.  He  thus  stood  between  Yahweh  anc 
His  people  both  as  the  organ  of  Revelation  and  as  the 
self-forgetting  intercessor,  who  suffered  for  sins  not  his 
own,  as  well  as  for  sins  which  his  connection  with  his 
nation  had  brought  upon  him ;  who,  instead  of  repining, 
was  willing  to  be  blotted  out  of  God's  book  if  that  could 
benefit  his  people. 

This  representation  of  Moses  is  not  accidental.  It  is  in 
complete  accord  with  a  characteristic  of  Israelite  literature 
from  beginning  to  end.  In  the  earliest  historical  records 
we  find  that  the  chief  heroes  of  the  nation  are  mediators, 
standing  for  God  in  the  face  of  evil  men,  and  pleading 
with  God  for  men  when  they  are  broken  and  penitent,  or 
even  when  they  are  only  terrified  and  restrained  by  the 
terror  of  the  Lord.  At  the  beginning  of  the  national 
history  we  see  the  noble  figure  of  Abraham  in  an  agony 
of  supplication  and  entreaty  before  God  on  behalf  of  the 
cities  of  the  plain.  At  the  end  of  it,  we  see  the  Christ, 
the  supreme  "  mediator  between  God  and  man,"  pouring 
out  His  soul  unto  death  for  men  "while  they  were  yet 
sinners,"  dying,  the  just  for  the  unjust,  taking  upon 
Himself  the  responsibility  for  the  sin  of  man,  and  refusing 
to  let  him  wander  away  into  permanent  separation  from 
God.  And  all  between  is  in  accord  with  this.  For  it  is 
not  Moses  only  who  is  regarded  as  having  a  mediatorial 
office.  The  very  people  itself  is  set,  by  the  promise  given 
to  Abraham,  in  the  same  position.  As  early  at  least  as 
the  eighth  century  it  was  put  before  Israel,  that  their 
calling  was  not  for  their  own  sakes  only,  but  that  in  them 
all  nations  of  the  earth  might  be  blessed.     And  at  their 


no  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

highest  moments  the  prophets  and  teachers  of  Israel 
always  recognised  this  as  their  nation's  part.  Even  when 
they  were  being  scattered  among  the  heathen,  it  was  that 
they  might  be  the  means  of  bringing  the  knowledge  of 
Yahweh  to  the  nations.  From  end  to  end  of  Scripture, 
therefore,  this  conception  is  wrought  into  the  very  fibre  of 
its  utterances.  It  is  of  the  essence  of  the  Biblical  concep- 
tion of  God  that  He  should  work  among  men  by  mediators. 
In  no  other  way  could  the  primary  Divine  message  be  set 
forth  than  by  the  prophetic  voice ;  in  no  other  way  than 
by  the  intercession  and  the  suffering  of  those  most  in 
harmony  with  the  Divine  will  could  any  effective  hold 
upon  God  be  given  to  His  people.  Only  by  those  who 
thus  proved  that  they  had  seen  Yahweh  could  His 
character  be  expressed.  Further,  it  was  in  this  way  that 
Moses  and  the  prophets,  the  rulers  and  the  saints  of 
Israel,  were  types  of  Christ.  They  were  not  mere 
puppets  set  forth  in  certain  crises  of  Israel's  history  to  go 
through  a  certain  career,  live  a  certain  life,  and  pass  into 
and  out  of  a  number  of  scenes,  in  order  that  they  might 
afford  us,  upon  whom  the  end  of  the  world  has  come, 
pictorial  proofs  that  all  things  in  this  history  were  pressing 
towards  and  converging  upon  Christ.  That  would  be  a 
very  artificial  way  of  conceiving  the  matter.  No,  each  of 
these  types  was  a  real  man,  with  real  tasks  of  his  own  to 
accomplish  in  the  world.  Not  only  were  they  all  real 
men,  they  were  the  leading  men  of  their  various  times. 
They  bore  the  burden  of  their  day  more  than  others  ; 
they  were  the  special  organs  of  Divine  power  and  grace  ; 
and  their  lives  were  spent  in  giving  impulse  and  direction 
to  the  movements  of  their  people's  life  towards  the  strange, 
unlooked-for  consummation  appointed  for  it.  They  were 
types  of  Christ,  they  gave  promise  of  Him,  not  because  of 
mere  arbitrary  appointment  or  selection,  but  because  they 
did  in  their  day,  in  a  lower  degree  and  at  an  earlier  stage. 


V.  22-33]  THE  MEDIATORSHIP  OF  MOSES  HI 

the  very  same  work  that  He  did.  Further,  the  whole 
nation  was  a  type  of  Christ  in  so  far  as  it  was  true  to  its 
calhng  at  all.  It  was  the  prophet  and  the  priest  among 
nations.  It  spread  abroad  the  knowledge  of  Him,  and  it 
died  at  last  as  a  nation  that  life  might  be  given  to  the 
world.  Both  Israel  and  all  the  men  who  truly  represented 
it  were  partakers  in  the  labours  and  in  the  sufferings  of 
Christ  beforehand,  just  as  Christians  are  said  to  fill  up 
the  measure  of  His  sufferings  now.  The  mediatorial 
character  of  Moses,  therefore,  was  essential.  It  is  no 
merely  formal  thing,  nor  an  afterthought.  He  would 
have  been  no  fit  founder  of  the  mediatorial  nation  had  he 
not  been  a  mediator  himself,  for  not  otherwise  could  he 
have  helped  to  realise  the  Abrahamic  promise. 

But  there  is  another  subsidiary  reason  why  a  mediator 
was  necessary  to  Israel  at  this  stage.  Behind  all  that 
Moses  taught  his  people  lay  necessarily  the  ancient 
popular  religion  of  the  Hebrews.  Now,  except  in  so  far 
as  it  may  have  been  changed  in  Egypt,  that  was  in  its 
main  features  the  same  as  the  religion  of  the  other 
nomadic  tribes  of  Semitic  stock,  for  the  Abrahamic  faith 
was,  clearly,  known  but  to  few.  But  the  names  given 
to  their  deities  by  these  people — such  as  Baal,  Adhonai, 
Milcom,  etc. — **all  expressed  submission  to  the  irresistible 
power  revealing  itself  in  nature,"  just  as  "Islam,"  which 
means  "  submission,"  indicates  that  Mohammedanism  is 
a  mere  perpetuation  of  this  view.^  Consequently  the 
Israelite  people  were  unable  to  conceive  God  save  as  a 
devouring  presence,  before  which  no  man  could  live. 
The  Mosaic  view  was,  in  itself,  immeasurably  higher,  and, 
besides  that,  it  opened  up  the  path  to  attainments  then 
inconceivable.  Moses  therefore  had  to  stand  alone  in 
his  new  relation  to  God,  while  the  people  cowered  away 

■  Cf.  Schultz,  Alttestamentlkhe  Theologie,  p.  92. 


112  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

in  terror,  dominated  entirely  by  the  lower  conception. 
They  could  not  stand  where  he  stood.  They  were  unable 
to  believe  that  power  was  not  Yahweh's  only  attribute ; 
while  Moses  had  had  revealed  to  him,  in  germ  at  least, 
that  God  was  "  merciful  and  gracious,  longsuffering  and 
slow  to  anger,"  and  that  a  life  passed  in  His  presence 
was  the  ideal  life  for  man.  Both  the  Yahwistic  narrative 
in  Exodus  and  the  repetition  of  it  in  Deuteronomy  give 
the  same  representation  of  the  events  at  Sinai,  and  indicate 
quite  clearly  that,  while  the  old  relation  to  God  was  in 
itself  good  so  far,  it  was  to  be  superseded  by  that  higher 
relation  in  which  Moses  stood.  That  is  the  meaning  of 
the  words  in  Deut.  v.  28,  29 :  ''  And  Yahweh  said  unto 
me,  I  have  heard  the  voice  of  the  words  of  this  people 
which  they  have  spoken  unto  thee  ;  they  have  well  said 
all  that  they  have  spoken.  Oh  that  there  were  such  a 
heart  in  them,  that  they  would  fear  Me  and  keep  all 
My  commandments,  always,  that  it  might  be  well  with 
them  and  with  their  children  for  ever  ! "  The  parallel 
passage  in  Exodus  is  xx.  20  :  "  And  Moses  said  unto 
the  people,  Fear  not :  for  God  is  come  to  prove  you, 
and  that  His  fear  may  be  before  you,  that  ye  sin  not." 
In  both,  the  standpoint  of  fear  is  approved  as  relatively 
good  and  wholesome.  It  was  well  that  the  people  should 
have  this  awestruck  fear  of  the  Divine,  for  it  would  act 
as  a  deterrent  from  sin.  But  it  was  not  sufficient.  It 
was  only  the  starting-point  for  the  attainments  which 
Yahweh  by  Moses,  and  in  Moses,  was  about  to  call  and 
incite  them  to.  Moses  therefore  had  to  stand  between 
Israel  and  Yahweh  in  this  too,  that  he  had  entered  into 
and  lived  in  relations  with  his  God  which  they  were  as 
yet  unable  either  to  conceive  or  to  endure. 

It  is  well  to  add,  also,  that  in  giving  approval  of  this 
kind  to  fear  as  a  religious  motive  these  early  teachers 
were   entirely  in   accord  with   the   final  development  of 


V. 22-33-]  THE  MEDIATORSHIP   OF  MOSES  113 

Israelite  religion  in  the  New  Testament.  The  modern 
view  that  any  appeal  to  fear  in  religion  or  morality  is 
degrading  would  have  been  simply  unintelligible  to  the 
Biblical  writers.  Even  now,  the  whole  fabric  of  society, 
the  state  with  its  officials  and  the  law  with  its  penalties, 
are  a  continual  protest  against  it  in  the  realm  of  practical 
morality.  In  truth  the  conflict  raised  about  this  matter 
in  modern  times  is  simply  a  conflict  between  superfine 
theories  and  facts.  Now  the  Old  Testament  is  throughout 
supremely  true  to  the  facts  of  human  nature  and  human 
experience.  It  is  practically  a  transcript  of  them  as  seen 
in  the  light  of  revelation.  In  a  time,  therefore,  when  in 
morals  and  religion  physical  fact  is  being  allowed  to 
override  or  pervert  psychical  fact,  the  Old  Testament  view 
is  peculiarly  wholesome.  It  helps  to  restore  the  balance 
and  to  keep  man's  thoughts  sane. 

Another  point  on  which  this  narrative  of  Deuteronomy 
corrects  and  restores  that  which  the  tendency  of  modern 
thought  has  perverted  is  an  even  more  important  one. 
We  have  seen  that  the  Old  Testament  view,  as  stated 
here,  and  as  it  is  interwoven  with  the  central  fibres  of 
the  Old  Testament  conception,  is  that  all  men  who  are 
called  to  the  task  of  permanently  raising  the  level  of 
human  life  and  thought  must  give  not  only  their  light  to, 
but  their  Hfe  for,  those  whom  they  seek  to  win  for  God. 
They  must  ask  nothing  from  mankind  but  ever  widening 
opportunities  for  service  and  self-sacrifice.  But  in  our 
modern  day  this  has  been  precisely  reversed,  and  men 
like  Goethe  and  Schopenhauer,  and  even  Carlyle,  have 
demanded  that  mankind  should  yield  service  to  them,  and 
then,  by  the  furtherance  and  development  they  thereby 
attain,  they  promise  to  work  out  the  deliverance  of  men 
from  superstition  and  unreality  and  the  bondage  of 
ignorance.  Goethe  in  this  matter  is  typical.  He  preached 
and   practised  in    the  most  uncompromising  manner  the 

8 


114  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

doctrine  of  self-development.  He  thought  that  he  could 
serve  humanity  in  no  way  so  well  as  by  making  every  one 
he  met,  and  all  the  experiences  he  encountered,  minister 
to  his  own  intellectual  growth.  Instead  of  saying  with 
Moses,  *'  Blot  me  out  of  Thy  book,"  but  spare  these  dim 
idolatrous  masses,  he  would  have  said,  ''Let  them  all  perish, 
and  let  me  become  the  origin  of  a  wiser,  more  intellectual, 
more  self-restrained  race  than  they."  He  consequently 
pursued  his  own  ends  relentlessly  from  his  early  years, 
and  attained  results  so  immense  that  almost  every 
domain  of  thought,  speculation,  and  science  is  now  under 
some  debt  to  him.  But  for  all  purposes  of  inspiring 
moral  and  spiritual  enthusiasm  he  is  practically  useless. 
His  selfishness,  however  high  its  kind,  accomplished  its 
work  and  left  him  cold,  unapproachable,  isolated.  This 
want  of  love  for  men  made  him  the  accurate  critic  of 
human  nature,  but  left  him  blind  in  great  degree  and 
hopeless  altogether  in  regard  to  those  possibilities  of 
better  things  which  are  never  wholly  wanting  to  it.  The 
result  is  that,  notwithstanding  his  heroic  powers,  his 
influence  is  to-day  rather  a  minus  quantity  in  the  spiritual 
and  moral  life.  No  one  who  has  not  warmth  from  other 
sources  pouring  in  upon  him  can  have  much  communion 
with  Goethe  without  losing  vitality,  and  in  his  presence 
the  Divine  passion  of  self-sacrificing  love  looks  out  of 
place,  or  even  slightly  absurd.  His  power  is  fascinating, 
but  it  freezes  all  the  sources  of  the  nobler  spiritual 
emotions,  and  ultimately  must  tend  to  the  impoverishing 
of  human  nature  and  the  lowering  of  the  level  of  human 
life.  No ;  men  are  not  to  be  reached  so  if  it  is  wished 
to  raise  them  to  their  highest  powers,  and  all  experience 
proves  that  the  New  Testament  was  right  in  summing 
up  the  teaching  of  the  Old  by  the  words,  "  He  that  saveth 
his  life  shall  lose  it,  and  he  that  loseth  his  life  for  My 
sake  shall  find  it." 


V.  22-33.]  T'//^   MEDIATORSHIP   OF  MOSES  115 

"That  is  the  doctrine,  simple,  ancient,  true; 
Such  is  life's  trial,  as  old  earth  smiles  and  knows. 
If  you  loved  only  what  were  worth  your  love, 
Love  were  clear  gain,  and  wholly  well  for  you ; 
Make  the  low  nature  better  by  your  throes  I 
Give  earth  yourself,  go  up  for  gain  above  !  " ' 

'  Browning,  "James  Lee's  Wife,"  VIL 


CHAPTER    VII 

LOVE    TO    GOD    THE   LAW    OF    LIFE 

Deut.  vi.  4,  5 

T  N  these  verses  we  approach  "  the  commandments,  the 
X  statutes,  and  the  judgments "  which  it  was  to  be 
Moses'  duty  to  communicate  to  the  people,  i.e.  the  second 
great  division  of  the  teaching  and  guidance  received  at 
Sinai.  But  though-"we-~approach  them  we  do  not  come 
to  them  for  a  number-of  chapters  yet.  We  reach  them 
only  in  chapter  xii.,  which  begins  with  almost  the  same 
-TV'OKiJs  as  chapter  vi.  What  lies  between  is  a  new  ex- 
hortation, very  similar  in  tone  and  subject  to  that  into 
which  chapters  i — iii.  have  been  transformed. 

To  some  readers  in  our  day  this  repetition,  and  the 
renewed  postponement  of  the  main  subject  of  the  book, 
have  seemed  to  justify  the  introduction  of  a  new  author 
here.  They  are  scornfully  impatient  of  the  repetition 
and  delay,  especially  those  of  them  who  have  them- 
selves a  rapid,  dashing  style ;  and  they  declare  that  the 
writer  of  the  laws,  etc.,  from  chapter  xii.  onwards 
cannot  have  been  the  writer  of  these  long  double  intro- 
ductions. They  would  not  have  written  so ;  consequently 
no  one  else,  however  different  his  circumstances,  his 
objects,  and  his  style  may  be,  can  have  written  so.  It 
is  true,  they  admit,  that  the  style,  the  grammar,  the 
vocabulary  are  all  exactly  those  of  the  purely  legal 
chapters,  but  that  matters  not.     Their  irritation  with  this 

ii6 


vi.  4,  5-]  LOVE   TO   GOD   THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  117 

delay  is  decisive ;  and  so  they  introduce  us,  entirely  on 
the  strength  of  it,  to  another  Deuteronomist,  second  or 
third  or  fourth — who  knows  ?  But  all  this  is  too  purely 
subjective  to  meet  with  general  acceptance,  and  we  may 
without  difficulty  decide  that  the  linguistic  unity  of  the 
book,  when  chapters  vi.  to  xii.  are  compared  with  what 
we  find  after  xii.,  is  sufficient  to  settle  the  question  of 
authorship. 

But  we  have  now  to  consider  the  posiiible  reasons  for 
this  second  long  introduction.     The  first  introduction  has 
been    satisfactorily  explained    in    a    former  chapter;  this 
second  one   can,   I    think,   quite   as    easily   be   accounted 
for.      The    object   of  the    book    is    in    itself  a    sufficient 
explanation.       To    modern    critical    students    of  the    Old 
Testament  the  laws  are  the  main  interest  of  Deuteronomy. 
They  are  the  material  they  need  for  their  reconstruction 
of  the  history  of  Israel,  and   they  feel  as  if  all  besides, 
though  it  may  contain  beautiful  thoughts,  were  irrelevant. 
But    that    was   not    the    writer's    point    of    view    at    all. 
For  him  it  was   not  the  main   thing   to   introduce   new 
laws.     He  was  conscious  rather  of  a  desire  to  bring  old 
laws,  well  known  to  his  fellow-countrymen,  but  neglected 
by  them,  into  force  again.     Anything  new  in  his  version 
of  them    was   consequently  only  such    an  adaptation   of 
them  to  the  new  circumstances  of  his  time  as  would  tend 
to   secure   their  observance.      Even  if  Moses  were   the 
author  of  the  book  this  would  be  true ;  but  if  a  prophetic 
man  in  Manasseh's  day  was  the  author,  we  can  see  how 
naturally  and  exclusively  that  view  would  fill  his  mind. 
He  had  fallen  upon  evil  times.     The  best  that  had  been 
attained  in  regard  to  spiritual  religion  had  been  deliber- 
ately abandoned  and    trodden   under    foot.      Those  who 
sympathised  with  pure  religion  could  only  hope   that  a 
time  would  come  when  Hezekiah's  work  would  be  taken 
up  again.     If  Deuteronomy  was  written  in  preparation  for 


Ii8  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

that  time,  the  legal  additions  necessary  to  ward  off  the 
evils  which  had  been  so  nearly  fatal  to  Yahwism  would 
seem  to  the  author  much  less  important  than  they  appear 
to  us  to  be.  His  object  was  to  retrieve  what  had  been 
lost,  to  rouse  the  dead  minds  of  his  countrymen,  to 
illustrate  that  on  which  the  higher  life  of  the  nation 
depended,  and  to  throw  light  upon  it  from  all  the  sources 
of  what  then  was  modern  thought.  His  mind  was  full  of 
the  high  teaching  of  the  prophets.  He  was  steeped  in 
the  history  of  his  people,  which  was  then  receiving,  or 
was  soon  to  receive,  its  all  but  final  touches.  He  was 
intensely  anxious  that  in  the  later  time  for  which  he  was 
writing  all  men  should  see  how  Providence  had  spoken 
for  the  Mosaic  law  and  religion,  and  what  the  great 
principles  were  which  had  always  underlain  it,  and  which 
had  now  at  last  been  made  entirely  explicit. 

Under  these  circumstances,  it  was  not  merely  natural 
that  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  should  dwell  with  in- 
sistence upon  the  hortatory  part  of  his  book ;  it  was 
necessary.  He  could  not  feel  Wellhausen's  haste  to 
approach  his  restatement  of  the  law.  To  him  the 
exhortation  was,  in  fact,  the  important  thing.  Every  day 
he  Hved  he  must  have  seen  that  it  was  not  want  of 
knowledge  that  misled  his  contemporaries.  He  must 
have  groaned  too  often  under  the  weight  of  the  indiffer- 
ence even  of  the  well  disposed  not  to  be  aware  that  that 
was  the  great  hindrance  to  the  restoration  of  the  better 
thoughts  and  ways  of  Hezekiah's  day. 
/^He  had  learned  by  bitter  experience,  what  every  man 
who  is  in  earnest  about  inducing  masses  of  men  to  take 
a  step  backward  or  forward  to  a  higher  life  always  learns, 
that  nothing  can  be  accomplished  till  a  fire  has  been 
kindled  in  the  hearts  of  men  which  will  not  let  them 
rest.  To  this  task  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  devotes 
himself     And  whatever  impatient  theorists  of  to-day  may 


vi.4,  5]  LOVE   TO  GOD   THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  119 

say,  he  succeeds  amazingly.  His  exhortation  touches 
men  from  one  end  of  the  world  to  the  other,  even  to  this 
day,  by  its  affectionate  impressiveness.  His  exhibition  of 
the  principles  underlying  the  law  is  so  true  that,  when 
our  Lord  was  asked,  "  Which  is  the  first  commandment 
of  all  ?  "  He  answered  from  this  chapter  of  Deuteronomy  : 
^'  The  first  of  all  the  commandments  is  this,  The  Lord  our 
God  is  one  Lord  :  and  thou  shalt  love  the  Lord  thy  God 
with  all  thy  heart,  and  with  all  thy  soul,  and  with  all 
thy  strength.  The  second  is  this,  Thou  shalt  love  thy 
neighbour  as  thyself.  There  is  none  other  commandment 
greater  than  these."  Now  these  are  precisely  the  truths 
Deuteronomy'  exhibits  in  these  prefatory  chapters,  and 
it  is  by  them  that  the  after-treatment  of  the  law  is 
permeated.  The  author  of  Deuteronomy  by  announcing 
these  truths  brought  the  Old  Testament  faith  as  near  to 
the  level  of  the  New  Testament  faith  as  was  possible  ; 
and  we  may  well  believe  that  he  saw  his  work  in  its 
true  relative  proportions.  The  hortatory  chapters  are 
really  the  most  original  part  of  the  book,  and  exhibit 
what  was  most  permanent  in  it.  The  mere  fact  that  the 
author  lingers  over  it,  therefore,  is  entirely  inadequate  to 
justify  us  in  admitting  a  later  hand.  Indeed,  if  criticism 
is  to  retain  the  respect  of  reasonable  men,  it  will  have  to 
be  more  sparing  than  it  has  hitherto  been  with  the  *'  later 
hand "  ;  to  introduce  it  here  under  the  circumstances  is 
nothing  short  of  a  blunder. 

In  our  verses,  therefore,  we  have  to  deal  with  the  main 
point    of    our    book.       Coming     immediately    after    tfis 
Decalogue,  these  words  render  explicit  the  principle  of  the \ 
first  table  of  that  law.     In  them   our  author  is  making    \ 
it   clear  that  all   he   has  to  say  of  worship,  and   of  the      J 
relation    of  Israel   to  Yahweh,  is  merely  an    application^/ 
of  this  principle,   or  a  statement    of  means    by  which  a 
life  at  the  level  of  love  to  God  may  be  made  possible  or 


I20  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

secured.  This  section,  therefore,  forms  the  bridge  which 
connects  the  Decalogue  with  the  legal  enactments  which 
follow;  and  it  is  on  all  accounts  worthy  of  very  special 
attention.  Our  Lord's  quotation  of  it  as  the  supreme 
statement  of  the  Divine  law,  in  its  Godward  aspect,  would 
in  itself  be  an  overwhelmingly  special  reason  for  thorough 
study  of  it,  and  would  justify  us  in  expecting  to  find  it  one 
of  the  deepest  things  in  Scripture. 

The  translation  of  the  first  clause  presents  difficulties. 
The  Authorised  Version  gives  us,  "  Hear,  O  Israel  :  The 
Lord  our  God  is  one  Lord,"  but  that  can  no  longer  be 
accepted,  since  it  rests  upon  the  JeAvish  substitution  of 
Adhonai  for  Yahweh.  Taking  this  view  of  the  construc- 
tion, it  should  be  rendered,  ''  Hear,  O  Israel  :  Yahweh  our 
God  is  one  Yahweh  "  ;  and  this  is  the  meaning  which  most 
recent  authorities — e.g.  Knobel,  Keil,  and  Dillmann — put 
upon  it.  But  equally  good  authorities — such  as  Ewald 
and  Oehler — render,  ''  Yahweh  our  God — Yahweh  is  one." 
This  is  unobjectionable  grammatically.  Still  another 
translation,  '*  Hear,  O  Israel  :  Yahweh  is  our  God,  Yahweh 
alone,"  has  been  received  by  the  most  recent  and  most 
scholarly  German  translation  of  the  Scripture,  that  edited 
by  Kautzsch.  But  the  objection  that  in  that  case  Ibhaddoy 
not  ^echadh^  should  have  been  used,  seems  conclusive 
against  it.  The  two  others  come  very  much  to  the  same 
thing  in  the  end,  and  were  it  not  for  the  time  at  which 
Deuteronomy  was  written,  Ewald's  translations  would  be 
the  simpler  and  more  acceptable.  But  the  first — '*  Yahweh 
our  God  is  one  Yahweh  " — exactly  meets  the  circumstances 
of  that  time,  and  moreover  emphasises  that  in  Israel's 
God  which  the  writer  of  Deuteronomy  was  most  anxious 
to  establish.  As  against  the  prevailing  tendency  of  the 
time,  he  not  only  denies  polytheism,  or,  as  Dillmann  puts 
it,  asserts  the  concrete  fact  that  the  true  God  cannot  be 
resolved    in   the  polytheistic    manner  into  various  kinds 


vi.4, 5]  LOVE  TO   GOD   THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  121 

and  shades  of  deity,  like  the  Baalim,  but  he  also  prohibits 
the  amalgamation    or   partial  identification    of  Him  with 
other  gods.      Though  very  little    is    told   us   concerning 
Manasseh  s  idolatry,  we  know  enough  to  feel  assured  that 
it   was  in  this    fashion    he  justified    his   introduction    of 
Assyrian  deities  into  the  Temple  worship.      Moloch,  for 
example,  must  in   some  way  have    been    identified    with 
Yahweh,   since    the  sacrifices   of  children  in  Tophet  are 
declared  by  Jeremiah  to  have  been  to  Yahweh.     Further, 
the  worship  at    the  High    Places  had  led,  doubtless,   to 
belief  in  a  multitude  of  local  Yahwehs,  who  in  some  obscure 
way  were  yet  regarded  as  one,  just  as  the  multitudinous 
shrines   of   the    Virgin    in    Romanist  lands    lead    to    the 
adoration  of  our  Lady  of  Lourdes,  our  Lady  of  Staples, 
and   so  on,   though  the  Church  knows  only  one  Virgin 
Mother.     This  incipient    and    unconscious    polytheism    it 
was  our  author's  purpose  to  root  out  by  his  law  of  one 
altar;  and  it  seems  congruous,  therefore,  that  he  should 
sum  up  the  first  table  of  the  Decalogue  in  such  a  way  as 
to  bring  out  its  opposition  to  this  great  evil.     Of  course 
the  oneness  of  deity  as  such  is  involved  in  what  he  says  ; 
but  the  aspect  of  this  truth  which  is  specially  put  forward 
here  is  that  Yahweh,  being  God,  is  one  Yahweh,  with  no 
partners,  nor  even  with  variations  that  practically  destroy 
unity.       No   proposition  could   have   been    framed    more 
precisely  and  exactly  to  contradict  the  general  opinion  of 
Manasseh  and  his  followers  regarding  religion  ;  and  in  it 
the  watchword  of  monotheism  was  spoken.     Since  it  was 
uttered,  this  has  been  the  rallying  point  of  monotheistic 
religion,   both    among    Jews    and    Mohammedans.      For 
"  there  is  no  God  but  God  "  is  precisely  the  counterpart 
of  "  Yahweh  is  one  Yahweh  "  ;  and  from  one  end  of  the 
civilised   world    to   the   other   this   strenuous   confession 
of  faith  has  been  heard,  both  as  the  tumultuous  battle- 
shout     of    victorious     armies,     and     as     the     stubborn 


122  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

and  immovable  assertion  of  the  despised,  and  scattered, 
and  persecuted  people  to  whom  it  was  first  revealed. 
Even  to-day,  though  in  the  hands  of  both  Jews  and 
Mohammedans  it  has  been  hardened  into  a  dogma  which 
has  stripped  the  Mosaic  conception  of  Yahweh  of  those 
elements  which  gave  it  possibilities  of  tenderness  and 
expansion,  it  still  has  power  over  the  minds  of  men.  Even 
in  such  hands,  it  incites  missionary  effort,  and  it  appeals 
to  the  heart  at  some  stages  of  civilisation  as  no  other  creed 
does.  It  makes  men,  nay,  even  civilised  men,  of  the  wild 
fetich-worshipping  African ;  but  for  want  of  what  follows 
in  our  context  it  leaves  them  stranded — at  a  higher  level,  it 
is  true,  but  stranded  nevertheless — without  possibilities  of 
advance,  and  exposed  to  that  terrible  decay  in  their  moral 
and  spiritual  conceptions  which  sooner  or  later  asserts 
itself  in  every  Mohammedan  community. 

Israel  was  saved  from  the  same  spiritual  disease  by 
the  great  words  which  succeed  the  assertion  of  Yahweh's 
oneness.  The  writer  of  Deuteronomy  did  not  desire  to 
set  forth  this  declaration  as  an  abstract  statement  of 
ultimate  truth  about  God.  He  makes  it  the  basis  of  a 
quite  new,  a  quite  original  demand  upon  his  countrymen 
Because  Yahweh  thy  God  is  one  Yahweh,  "  thou  shalt 
love  Yahweh  thy  God  with  all  thine  heart,  and  with  all 
thy  soul,  and  with  all  thy  might."  To  us,  who  have 
inherited  all  that  was  attained  by  Israel  in  their  long 
and  eventful  history  as  a  nation,  and  especially  in  its 
disastrous  close,  it  may  have  become  a  commonplace 
that  God  demands  the  love  of  His  people.  But  if  so, 
we  must  make  an  effort  to  shake  off  the  dull  yoke  of 
custom  and  familiarity.  If  we  do,  we  shall  see  that  it 
was  an  extraordinarily  original  thing  which  the  Deuter- 
onomist  here  declares.  In  the  whole  of  the  Old  Testament 
there  are,  outside  of  Deuteronomy,  thirteen  passages  in 
which  the  love  of  men  to  Yahweh  is  spoken  of.     They  are 


vi.4, 5-]  LOVE   TO   GOD   THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  123 

Exod.  XX.  6 ;  Josh.  xxii.  5,  xxiii.  1 1  ;  Judges  v.  31; 
I  Kings  iii.  3  ;  Neh.  i.  5  ;  Psalms  xviii.  2,  xxxi.  24, 
xci.  14,  xcvii.  10,  cxvi.  I,  cxlv.  20  ;  and  Dan.  ix.  4.  Now 
of  these  the  verses  from  Nehemiah  and  Daniel  are  mani- 
festly later  than  Deuteronomy,  and  of  the  Psalms  only 
the  eighteenth  can  with  any  confidence  be  assigned  to  a 
time  earlier  than  the  seventh  century  B.C.  All  the  others 
may  with  great  probability  be  assigned  at  earliest  to  the 
times  of  Jeremiah  and  the  post-exilic  period.  Three  of 
the  passages  from  the  historic  books  again — Josh.  xxii.  5, 
xxiii.  II  ;  I  Kings  iii.  3 — are  attributed,  on  grounds  largely 
apart  from  the  use  of  this  expression,  to  the  Deuteronomic 
editor,  i.e.  the  writer  who  went  over  the  historical  books 
about  600  B.C.,  and  made  slight  additions  here  and  there, 
easily  recognisable  by  their  differing  in  tone  and  feeling 
from  the  surrounding  context.  Indeed  Josh.  xxii.  5  is  a 
palpable  quotation  from  Deuteronomy  itself. 

Of  the  thirteen  passages,  therefore,  only  three — Exod. 
XX.  6,  Judges  v.  31,  and  Psalm  xviii.  2 — belong  to  the  time 
previous  to  Deuteronomy,  and  in  all  three  the  mention 
of  love  to  God  is  only  allusive,  and,  as  it  were,  by  the  way. 
Before  Deuteronomy,  consequently,  there  is  little  more 
than  the  mere  occurrence  of  the  word.  There  is  nothing 
of  the  bold  and  decisive  demand  for  love  to  the  one  God 
as  the  root  and  ground  of  all  true  relations  with  Him 
which  Deuteronomy  makes.  At  most,  there  is  the  hint 
of  a  possibility  which  might  be  realised  in  the  future  ;  of 
love  to  God  as  the  permanent  element  in  the  life  of  man 
there  is  no  indication ;  and  it  is  this  which  the  author  of 
Deuteronomy  means,  and  nothing  less  than  this.  He 
makes  this  demand  for  love  the  main  element  of  his 
teaching.  He  returns  to  it  again  and  again,  so  that  there 
are  almost  as  many  passages  bearing  on  this  in  Deuter- 
onomy as  in  the  whole  Old  Testament  besides ;  and  the 
particularity  and  emphasis  with  which  he  dwells  upon  it 


124  THE   BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

are  immeasurably  greater.  Only  in  the  New  Testament 
do  we  find  anything  quite  parallel  to  what  he  gives  us  ; 
and  there  we  find  his  view  taken  up  and  expanded,  till 
love  to  God  flashes  upon  us  from  almost  every  page  as 
the  test  of  all  sincerity  and  the  guarantee  of  all  success 
in  the  Christian  life. 

To  proclaim  this  truth  was  indeed  a  great  achievement ; 
and  when  we  remember  the  abject  fear  with  which  Israel 
had  originally  regarded  Yahweh,  it  will  appear  still  more 
remarkable  that  the  book  embodying  this  should  have 
been  adopted  by  the  whole  people  with  enthusiasm,  and 
that  with  it  should  begin  the  Canon  of  Holy  Scripture ; 
for  Deuteronomy,  as  all  now  recognise,  was  the  first  book 
which  became  canonical.  I  have  said  that  the  conception 
was  an  extraordinarily  original  one,  and  have  pointed  out 
that  it  had  not  been  traceable  to  any  extent  previously  in 
Israel's  religious  books  or  its  religious  men.  It  will 
appear  still  more  original,  I  think,  if  we  consider  what 
a  growth  in  moral  and  spiritual  stature  separates  the 
Israel  of  Moses'  day  and  that  of  Josiah's ;  what  the 
attitude  of  other  nations  to  their  gods  was  in  contrast 
to  this ;  and,  lastly,  what  it  involves  and  implies,  as 
regards  the  nature  of  both  God  and  man. 

As  we  have  already  seen,  the  earlier  narratives  represent 
the  men  to  whom  Moses  spoke  as  acknowledging  that 
they  could  not,  as  yet  at  any  rate,  bear  to  remain  in  the 
presence  of  Yahweh.  Between  their  God  and  them, 
therefore,  there  could  be  no  relation  of  love  properly  so 
called.  There  was  reverence,  awe,  and  chiefly  fear, 
tempered  by  the  belief  that  Yahweh  as  their  God  was 
on  their  side.  He  had  proved  it  by  delivering  them  from 
the  oppressions  of  Egypt,  and  they  acknowledged  Him 
and  were  jealous  for  His  honour  and  submissive  to  His 
commands.  So  far  as  the  record  goes,  that  would 
seem  to  have  been  their  religious  state.     Progress  from 


vi.4, 5]  LOVE   TO   GOD    THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  125 

that  state  of  mind  to  a  higher,  to  a  demand  for  direct 
personal  relations  between  each  individual  Israelite  and 
Yahweh,  was  not  easy.  It  was  hindered  by  the  fact  that 
Israel  as  a  whole,  and  not  the  individual,  was  for  a  long 
time  regarded  as  the  subject  of  religion.  That,  of  course, 
was  no  hindrance  to  the  development  of  the  thought  that 
Yahweh  loved  Israel ;  but  so  long  as  that  conception 
dominated  religious  thought  in  Israel,  so  long  was  it 
impossible  to  think  of  individual  love  and  trust  as  the 
element  in  which  each  faithful  man  should  live. 

But  the  love  of  Yahweh  was  declared,  century  after 
century,  by  prophet  and  priest  and  psalmist,  to  be  set 
upon  tlis  people,  and  so  the  way  for  this  demand  for  love 
on  man's  part  was  opened,  Man's  relations  with  God 
began  to  grow  more  intimate.  The  distance  lessened, 
as  the  use  of  the  words  "  them  that  love  Me  "  in  the 
song  of  Deborah  and  the  Davidic  word  in  Psalm  xviii., 
"  I  love  thee,  Yahweh  my  rock,"  clearly  show.  Hosea 
next  took  up  the  strain,  and  intensified  and  heightened 
it  in  a  wonderful  manner,  but  the  nation  failed  to 
respond  adequately.  In  the  later  prophets  the  love 
and  grace  and  longsuffering  of  Yahweh  and  His  cease- 
less efforts  on  behalf  of  Israel  are  continually  made 
the  ground  of  exhortations,  entreaties,  and  reproaches ; 
but,  as  a  whole,  the  people  still  did  not  respond.  We 
may  be  sure,  however,  that  an  ever  increasing  minority 
were  affected  by  the  clearness  and  intensity  of  the 
prophetic  testimony.  To  this  minority,  the  Israel  within 
Israel,  the  remnant  that  was  to  return  from  exile  and 
become  the  seed  of  a  people  that  should  be  all  righteous, 
the  love  of  Yahweh  tended  to  become  His  main  charac- 
teristic. That  love  sustained  their  hopes  ;  and  though  the 
awe  and  reverence  which  were  due  to  His  holiness,  and  the 
fear  called  forth  by  His  power,  still  predominated,  there 
grew   up   in   their   hearts    a   multitude   of  thoughts   and 


126  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

expectations  tending  more  and  more  to  the  love  of 
God. 

As  yet  it  was  only  a  timid  reaching  out  towards  Him, 
a  hope  and  longing  which  could  hardly  justify  itself.  Yet 
it  was  robust  enough  not  to  be  killed  by  disappointment, 
by  hope  deferred,  or  even  by  crushing  misfortune ;  and 
in  the  furnace  of  affliction  it  became  stronger  and  more 
pure.  And  in  the  heart  of  the  author  of  Deuteronomy 
it  grew  certain  of  itself,  and  soared  up  with  an  eagerness 
that  would  not  be  denied.  Then,  as  always  where  God 
is  the  object  of  it,  love  that  dares  was  justified ;  and  out 
of  its  restless  and  timid  longings  it  came  to  the  ''place  of 
rest  imperturbable,  where  love  is  not  forsaken  if  itself 
forsaketh  not."^  From  knowledge,  confirmed  by  the 
answering  love  and  inspiration  of  God,  and  impelled 
consciously  by  Him,  he  then  in  this  book  made  and 
reiterated  his  great  demand.  All  spiritual  men  found  in 
it  the  word  they  had  needed.  They  responded  to  it 
eagerly  when  the  book  was  pubKshed ;  and  their  enthu- 
siasm carried  even  the  torpid  and  careless  masses  with 
them  for  a  time.  The  nation,  with  the  king  at  their  head, 
accepted  the  legislation  of  which  this  love  to  God  was  the 
underlying  principle,  and  so  far  as  public  and  corporate 
action  can  go,  Israel  adopted  the  deepest  principle  of 
spiritual  life  as  their  own. 

Of  course  with  the  mass  this  assent  had  little  depth  ; 
but  in  the  hearts  of  the  true  men  in  Israel  the  joy  and 
assurance  of  their  great  discovery,  that  Yahweh  their 
God  was  open  to,  nay,  desired  and  commanded,  their  most 
fervent  affection,  soon  produced  its  fruit.  From  the 
fragments  of  the  earliest  legislation  which  have  come 
down  to  us,  it  is  obvious  that  the  Mosaic  principles  had 
led  to  a  most  unwonted  consideration   for  the  poor.     In 

^  Augustine's  Confessions,  p.  64. 


vi.4,5-]  LOVE   TO   GOD   THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  127 

later  days,  though  the  ingrained  tendency  to  oppression, 
which  those  who  have  power  in  the  East  seem  quite 
unable  to  resist,  did  its  evil  work  in  both  Israel  and 
Judah,  there  were  never  wanting  prophetic  voices  to 
denounce  such  villainy  in  the  spirit  of  these  laws.  The 
public  conscience  was  thereby  kept  alive,  and  the  ideal  of 
justice  and  mercy,  especially  to  the  helpless,  became  a 
distinguishing  mark  of  Israelite  religion.  But  it  was  in 
the  minds  of  those  who  had  learned  the  Deuteronomist's 
great  lesson,  and  had  taken  example  by  him,  that  the  love 
which  came  from  God,  and  had  just  been  answered  back 
by  man  overflowed  in  a  stream  of  blessing  to  man's 
"  neighbours."  Deuteronomy  had  uttered  the  first  and 
great  commandment ;  but  it  is  in  the  Law  of  Holiness, 
that  complex  of  ancient  laws  brought  together  by  the 
author  of  P,  and  found  now  mainly  in  Lev.  xvii. — xxvi., 
that  we  find  the  second  word,  "  Thou  shalt  love  thy  neigh- 
bour as  thyself"  ^  If  we  ask.  Who  is  my  neighbour  ?  we 
find  that  not  even  those  beyond  Israel  are  excluded,  for  in 
Lev.  xix.  34  we  read,  *^  The  stranger  that  sojourneth  with 
you  shall  be  unto  you  as  the  homeborn  among  you,  and 
thou  shalt  love  him  as  thyself"  The  idea  still  needed 
the  expansion  which  it  received  from  our  Lord  Himself 
in  the  parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan ;  but  it  is  only  one 
step  from  these  passages  to  the  New  Testament. 

From  the  standpoint  of  mere  fear,  then,  to  the  stand- 
point of  love  which  casteth  out  fear,  even  the  masses  of 
Israel  were  lifted,  in  thought  at  least,  by  the  love  and 
teaching  of  God.  And  the  process  by  which  Israel  was  led 
to  this  height  has  proved  ever  since  to  be  the  only  possible 
way  to  such  an  attainment.  It  began  in  the  free  favour 
of  God,  it  was  continued  by  the  answer  of  love  on  the  part 
of  man,  and  these  antecedents  had  as  their  consequence 

'  Lev.  xix.   18,  34. 


128  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  proclamation  of  that  law  of  liberty — for  self- 
renouncing  love  is  liberty — ''  Thou  shalt  love  thy 
neighbour  as  thyself."  Without  the  first,  the  second 
was  impossible ;  and  the  last  without  the  other  two 
would  have  been  only  a  satire  upon  the  incurable  selfish- 
ness of  man.  It  is  worthy  of  remark,  at  least,  that  only 
on  the  critical  theory  of  the  Old  Testament  is  each  of 
these  steps  in  the  moral  and  religious  education  of  Israel 
found  in  its  right  place,  with  its  right  antecedents  ;  only 
when  taken  so  do  the  teachers  who  were  inspired  to 
make  each  of  these  attainments  find  circumstances 
suited  to  their  message,  and  a  soil  in  which  the  germs 
they  were  commissioned  to  plant  could  live. 

But  great  as  is  the  contrast  between  the  Israel  of 
Moses'  day  and  that  of  Josiah's,  it  is  not  so  great  as  the 
contrast  between  the  religion  of  Israel  in  the  Deuteronomic 
period  and  the  religion  of  the  neighbouring  nations. 
Among  them,  at  our  date  650  e.g.,  there  was,  so  far  as 
we  know  them,  no  suggestion  of  personal  love  to  God 
as  an  effective  part  of  religion.  In  the  chapters  on  the 
Decalogue  the  main  ideas  of  the  Canaanites  in  regard  to  reli- 
gion have  been  described,  so  that  they  need  not  be  repeated 
here.  I  shall  add  only  what  E.  Meyer  says  of  their  gods  : 
"  With  advancing  culture  the  cultus  loses  its  old  simplicity 
and  homeliness.  A  fixed  ritual  was  developed — founded 
upon  old  hereditary  tradition.  And  here  the  gloomier 
conception  became  the  ruling  one,  and  its  consequences 
were  inexorably  deduced.  The  great  gods,  even  the  pro- 
tecting gods  of  the  tribe  or  the  town,  are  capricious  and 
in  general  hostile  to  man — possibly  to  some  degree  be- 
cause of  the  mythological  conception  of  Baal  as  sun-god — 
and  they  demand  sacrifices  of  blood  that  they  may  be 
appeased.  In  order  that  evil  may  be  warded  off  from 
those  with  whom  they  are  angry,  another  human  being 
must  be  offered  to  them  as  a  substitute  in  propitiatory 


vi.4,5-]  LOVE    TO   GOD    THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  129 

sacrifice — nay,  they  demand  the  sacrifice  of  the  firstborn, 
the  best-loved  son.  If  the  community  be  threatened  with 
the  wrath  of  the  deity,  then  the  prince  or  the  nobihty  as 
a  whole  must  offer  up  their  children  on  its  behalf."  ^  This 
also  is  the  view  of  Robertson  Smith/  who  considers  that 
while  in  their  origin  the  Semitic  religions  involved  kindly 
relations  and  continual  intercourse  between  the  gods  and 
their  worshippers,  these  gradually  disappeared  as  political 
misfortune  began  to  fall  upon  the  smaller  Semitic  peoples. 
Their  gods  were  angry  and  in  the  vain  hope  of  appeasing 
them  men  had  recourse  to  the  direst  sacrifices.  Hints 
concerning  these  had  survived  from  times  of  savagery  ; 
and  to  the  diseased  minds  of  these  terror-stricken  peoples 
the  more  ancient  and  more  horrible  a  sacrifice  was  the 
more  powerful  did  it  seem.  At  this  time,  therefore,  the 
course  of  the  Canaanite  religions  was  away  from  love  to 
their  gods.  The  decay  of  nationality  brought  despair, 
and  the  frantic  efforts  of  despair,  into  the  religion  of  the 
Canaanite  peoples ;  but  to  Israel  it  brought  this  higher 
demand  for  more  intimate  union  with  their  God.  What- 
ever elements  tending  towards  love  the  Canaanite  religions 
originally  may  have  had,  they  had  either  been  mingled 
with  the  corrupting  sensuality  which  seems  inseparable 
from  the  worship  of  female  deities,  or  had  been  limited 
to  the  mere  superficial  good  understanding  which  their 
participation  in  the  same  common  life  estabhshed  between 
the  people  and  their  gods.  Their  union  was  largely  in- 
dependent of  moral  considerations  on  either  side.  But  in 
Israel  there  had  grown  up  quite  a  different  state  of  things. 
The  union  between  Yahweh  and  His  people  had  from  the 
days  of  the  Decalogue  taken  a  moral  turn ;  and  gradually 
it  had  become  clear  that  to  have  Abraham  for  their  father 
and  Yahweh   for   their    God  would  profit  them    little,   if 

*  Geschichie  des  Alterthums,  p.  249. 
"^  Religion  of  the  Semites,  p.  330. 


no  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


they  did  not  stand  in  right  moral  relations  and  in  moral 
sympathy  v/ith  Him.  Now,  in  Deuteronomy,  that  funda- 
mentally right  conception  of  the  relation  between  God  and 
man  received  its  crown  in  Yahweh's  claim  to  the  love  of 
His  people.  No  contrast  could  be  greater  than  that  which 
common  misfortune  and  a  common  national  ruin  produced 
between  the  surrounding  Semitic  peoples  and  Israel. 

But  besides  the  small  kingdoms  which  immediately 
surrounded  Palestine,  Israel  had  for  neighbours  the  two 
great  empires  of  Egypt  and  Assyria.  She  was  exposed 
therefore  to  influence  from  them  in  even  a  greater  degree. 
Long  before  the  Exodus,  the  land  which  Israel  came  after- 
wards to  occupy  had  been  the  meeting-place  of  Babylonian 
and  Egyptian  power  and  culture.  In  the  fifteenth  century 
B.C.  it  was  under  the  suzerainty  if  not  the  direct  sovereignty 
of  Egypt ;  but  its  whole  culture  and  literature,  for  it  must 
have  had  books,  as  the  name  Kirjath-Sepher  (Book-town) 
shows,  was  Babylonian.  Throughout  Israel's  history, 
moreover,  Assyrian  and  Egyptian  manners  and  ways  of 
thought  were  pressed  upon  the  people ;  and  we  cannot 
doubt  that  in  regard  to  religion  also  their  influence  was 
felt.  But  at  this  period,  as  in  the  Canaanite  religions,  so 
also  in  those  of  Assyria  and  Egypt,  the  tendency  was 
altogether  different  from  what  Deuteronomy  shows  it  to 
have  been  in  Israel. 

In  regard  to  Egypt  this  is  somewhat  diflicult  to  prove, 
for  the  Egyptian  religion  is  so  complicated,  so  varied,  and 
so  ancient,  that  men  v/ho  have  studied  it  despair  of  tracing 
any  progress  in  it.  A  kind  of  monotheism,  polytheism, 
fetichism,  animism,  and  nature-worship  such  as  we  find 
in  the  Vedas,  have  in  turn  been  regarded  as  its  primitive 
state ;  but  as  a  matter  of  fact  all  these  systems  of- religious 
thought  and  feeling  are  represented  in  the  earliest  records, 
and  they  remained  constant  elements  of  it  tiU  the  end.^ 
•  Cf.  Wiedemann,  Reiigion  der  alien  Aegypter,  p.  3. 


vi.4, 5]  LOVE   TO   GOD   THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  131 

Whatever  had  once  formed  part  of  it,  Egyptian  religion 
clung  to  with  extraordinary  tenacity.  As  time  went  on, 
however,  the  accent  was  shifted  from  one  element  to  the 
other,  and  after  the  times  of  the  XlXth  dynasty,  i.e.  after 
the  time  of  the  Exodus,  it  began  to  decay.  A  systematised 
pantheism,  of  which  sun-worship  was  the  central  element, 
was  elaborated  by  the  priests  ;  the  moral  element  which 
had  been  prominent  in  the  days  when  the  picture  of  the 
judgment  of  the  soul  after  death  was  so  popular  in  Thebes 
retired  more  into  the  background,  and  the  purely  magical 
element  became  the  principal  one.  Instead  of  moral  good- 
ness and  the  fulfilment  of  duty  being  the  main  support  of 
the  soul  in  its  dread  and  lonely  journeys  in  the  "  world 
of  the  Western  sky,"  knowledge  of  the  proper  formulas 
became  the  chief  hope,  and  the  machinations  of  evil 
demons  the  main  danger.  In  the  royal  tombs  at  Thebes 
the  walls  of  the  long  galleries  are  covered  with  represen- 
tations of  these  demons,  and  the  accompanying  writing 
gives  directions  as  to  the  proper  formulas  by  knowledge 
of  which  deliverance  can  be  secured.  This,  of  course, 
confined  the  benefits  of  religion,  so  far  as  they  related  to 
the  life  to  come,  to  the  educated,  and  the  wealthy.  For 
these  secret  spells  were  hard  to  obtain,  and  had  to  be 
purchased  at  a  high  price.  As  Wiedemann  says,  ^'  Still 
more  important  than  in  this  world  was  the  knowledge  of 
the  correct  magical  words  and  formulas  in  the  other  world. 
No  door  opened  here  if  its  name  was  not  known,  no 
daemon  let  the  dead  pass  in  if  he  did  not  address  him 
in  the  proper  fashion,  no  god  came  to  his  help  so  long  as 
his  proper  title  was  not  given  him,  no  food  could  be  pro- 
cured so  long  as  the  exactly  prescribed  words  were  not 
uttered."  ^  The  people  were  therefore  thrown  back  upon 
the  ancient  popular  faith,   which    needed  gods    only    for 

'  "Wiedemann,  p.  I,  35. 


132  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


practical  life,  and  honoured  them  only  because  they  were 
mighty.^  Some  of  them  were  believed  to  be  friendly  ;  but 
others  v/ere  malevolent  deities  who  would  destroy  man- 
kind if  they  did  not  mollify  them  by  magic,  or  render 
them  harmless  by  the  greater  power  of  the  good  gods. 
Consequently  Set,  the  unconquerable  evil  demon,  was 
worshipped  with  zeal  in  many  places.  With  him  there 
were  numerous  demons,  '^the  enemies,"  "the  evil  ones," 
which  lie  in  wait  for  individuals,  and  threaten  their  life 
and  weal.  The  main  thing,  therefore,  was  to  bring  the 
correct  sacrifices,  to  use  such  formulas  and  perform  such 
acts  as  would  render  the  gods  gracious  and  turn  away 
evil.  Moreover  the  whole  of  nature  was  full  of  spirits, 
as  it  is  to  the  African  of  to-day,  and  in  the  mystic  texts 
of  the  Book  of  the  Dead,  there  is  constant  mention  made 
of  the  **  mysterious  beings  whose  names,  whose  ceremonials 
are  not  known,"  which  thirst  for  blood,  which  bring  death, 
which  go  about  as  devouring  flame,  as  well  as  of  others 
which  do  good.  At  all  times  this  element  existed  in 
Egypt ;  but  precisely  at  this  time,  in  the  reign  of  Psamtik, 
Brugsch  ^  declares  that  new  force  was  given  to  it,  and  on 
the  monuments  there  appear,  along  with  the  "  great  gods," 
monstrous  forms  of  demons  and  genii.  In  fact  the  higher 
religion  had  become  pantheistic,  and  consequently  less 
rigidly  moral.  Magic  had  been  taken  up  into  it  for  the 
life  beyond  the  grave,  and  became  the  only  resource  of 
the  people  in  this  life.  Fear,  therefore,  necessarily  became 
the  ruling  religious  motive,  and  instead  of  growing  toward 
love  of  God,  men  in  Egypt  at  this  time  were  turning  more 
decisively  than  ever  away  from  it. 

Of  the  Assyrian   religion  and   its  influence   it  is   also 
difficult  to  speak  in  this  connection,  for  notwithstanding 


'  Cf.  Meyer,  p.  71. 

2  Egvpt  under  the  Pharaohs^  Brodick's  edition   p.  423. 


vi.4,  5]  LOVE    TO   GOD    THE   LAW  OF  LIFE  133 

the  amount  of  translation  that  has  been  done,  not  much 
has  come  to  Hght  in  regard  to  the  personal  religion  of 
the  Assyrians.  On  the  whole  it  seems  to  be  established 
that  in  its  main  features  the  religion  of  both  Babylon  and 
Assyria  remained  what  the  non-Semitic  inhabitants  of 
Akkad  had  made  it.  Originally  it  had  consisted  entirely 
of  a  spirit  and  demon  worship  not  one  whit  more 
advanced  than  the  religion  of  the  South  Sea  islanders 
to-day.  As  such  it  was  in  the  main  a  religion  of  fear. 
Though  some  spirits  were  good,  the  bulk  were  evil,  and 
all  were  capricious.  Men  were  consequently  all  their 
lifetime  subject  to  bondage,  and  love  as  a  religious 
emotion  was  impossible.  When  the  Semites  came  at  a 
later  time  into  the  country  their  star-worship  was  amal- 
gamated with  this  mere  Shamanism  of  the  Akkadians. 
In  the  new  faith  thus  evolved  the  great  gods  of  the 
Semites  were  arranged  in  a  hierarchy,  and  the  spirits, 
both  good  and  evil,  were  subordinated  to  them.  But 
even  the  great  gods  remain  within  the  sphere  of  nature, 
and  have  in  full  measure  the  defects  and  limitations  of 
nature-gods  everywhere.^  They  are  not  entirely  benefi- 
cent powers,  nor  are  they  even  moral  beings.  Some  have 
special  delight  in  blood  and  destruction,  while  the  cruel 
Semitic  child-sacrifice  was  practised  in  honour  of  others. 
Again,  their  displeasure  has  no  necessary  or  even  general 
connection  with  sin.  Their  wrath  is  generally  the  out- 
come of  mere  arbitrary  whim.  Indeed  it  may  be  doubted 
whether  the  conception  of  sin  or  of  moral  guilt  ever  had 
a  secure  footing  in  this  religion.  It  certainly  had  none  in 
the  terror-struck  hymn  to  the  seven  evil  spirits  who  are 
described  thus  : — 

"Seven  (are)  they,  seven  (are)  they. 
Male  they  (are)  not,  female  they  (are)  not ; 

'  Meyer,  p.  117, 


134  T'/f^  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Moreover  the  deep  is  their  pathway. 

Wife  they  have  not,  child  is  not  born  to  them. 

Lav^^  (and)  order  they  know  not, 

Prayer  and  supplication  hear  they  not. 

Wicked  (are)  they,  wicked  (are)  they." ' 

There  is  here  an  accent  of  genuine  terror,  which 
involved  not  love,  but  hatred.  Even  in  what  Sayce  calls 
a  ''  Penitential  Psalm,"  and  which  he  compares  to  the 
Biblical  Psalms,  there  is  nothing  of  the  gratitude  to  God 
as  a  deliverer  from  sin  which  in  Israel  was  the  chief 
factor  in  producing  the  response  to  Yahweh's  demand  for 
the  love  of  man.  Morally,  it  contains  nothing  higher 
than  is  contained  in  the  hymn  of  the  spirits.  The 
transgressions  which  are  so  pathetically  lamented,  and 
from  the  punishment  of  which  deliverance  is  so  earnestly 
sought,  are  purely  ceremonial  and  involuntary.  The 
author  of  the  prayer  conceives  that  he  has  to  do  with  a 
god  whose  wrath  is  a  capricious  thing,  coming  upon  men 
they  know  not  why.  So  conceived  God  cannot  be  loved. 
It  is  entirely  in  accord  with  this  that  in  the  great  flood 
epic  no  reason  is  given  for  the  destruction  of  mankind 
save  the  caprice  of  Bel.^  The  few  expressions  quoted 
by  Sayce  from  a  hymn  to  the  sun-god — such  as  this, 
^'  Merciful  God,  that  Hftest  up  the  fallen,  that  supportest 
the  weak.  .  .  .  Like  a  wife,  thou  submittest  thyself, 
cheerful  and  kindly.  .  .  .  Men  far  and  wide  bow  before 
thee  and  rejoice  " — cannot  avail  to  subvert  a  conclusion  so 

'  Sayce,  Babylonian  Literature,  p.  36.  Both  poems  here  referred  to  are 
pre-Assyrian,  being  found  as  translations  in  the  library  of  Assurbanipal. 
But  Assyrian  religion  made  no  progress  ;  it  seems  to  have  remained 
always  dependent  on  Babylonian,  even  in  details. 

^  Meyer,  p.  178.  Cf.  however  Sayce,  The  Higher  Criticism  and  the 
Monuments,  p.  114.  Sayce  maintains  that  the  Assyrian  epic  attributes 
the  flood  to  the  moral  guilt  of  men.  But  that  is  by  no  means  proved, 
for  it  is  more  than  doubtful  whether  sin  to  the  Assyrian  was  not  always 
mainly  a  ceremonial  matter. 


vi.4,  5]  LOVE   TO   GOD   THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  135 

firmly  fixed.  These  are  simply  the  ordinary  expressions 
which  the  mere  physical  pleasure  of  the  sunlight  brings  to 
the  lips  of  sun-worshippers  of  all  ages  and  of  all  climes. 
At  best  they  could  only  be  taken  as  germs  out  of  which 
a  loving  relation  between  God  and  man  might  have  been 
developed.  But  though  they  were  ancient  they  never 
were  developed.  At  the  end  as  at  the  beginning  the 
Assyrio-Babylonian  religion  moves  on  so  low  a  level, 
even  in  its  more  innocent  aspects,  that  a  development  like 
that  in  Deuteronomy  is  absolutely  impossible.  In  its  worse 
aspects  Assyrian  religion  was  unspeakable.  The  worship 
of  Ishtar  at  Nineveh  outdid  everything  known  in  the 
ancient  world  for  lust  and  cruelty. 

On  this  side  too,  therefore,  we  find  no  parallel  to 
Israel's  new  outgrowth  of  higher  religion.  Comparison 
only  makes  it  stand  out  more  boldly  in  its  splendid 
originality ;  and  we  are  left  with  the  fruitful  question, 
^*  What  was  the  root  of  the  astonishing  difference  between 
Yahweh  and  every  other  god  whom  Israel  had  heard  of?  " 
Precisely  at  this  time  and  under  the  same  circumstances, 
the  ethnic  religions  around  Israel  were  developing  away 
from  any  higher  elements  they  had  contained,  and  were 
thereby,  as  we  know  now,  hastening  to  extinction. 
Under  the  inspired  prophetic  influence,  Israel's  religion 
turned  the  loss  of  the  nation  into  gain ;  it  rose  by  the 
darkness  of  national  misfortune  into  a  nobler  phase  than 
any  it  had  previously  known. 

But  perhaps  the  crowning  merit  of  this  demand  for 
love  of  God  is  the  emphasis  it  lays  upon  personality  in 
both  God  and  man,  and  the  high  level  at  which  it  con- 
ceives their  mutual  relations.  From  the  first,  of  course, 
the  personal  element  was  always  very  strongly  present 
in  the  Israelite  conception  of  God.  Indeed  personality 
was  the  dominating  idea  among  all  the  smaller  nations 
which   surrounded    Israel.      The   national   god  was  con- 


136  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

ceived  of  mainly  as  a  greater  and  more  powerful  man,  full 
of  the  energetic  self-assertion  without  which  it  would  be 
impossible  for  any  man  to  reign  over  an  Eastern  com- 
munity. The  Moabite  stone  shows  this,  for  in  it  Chemosh 
is  as  sharply  defined  a  person  as  Mesha  himself.  The 
Canaanite  gods,  therefore,  might  be  wanting  in  moral 
character ;  their  existence  was  doubtless  thought  of  in  a 
limited  and  wholly  carnal  manner ;  but  there  never  was, 
apparently,  the  least  tendency  to  obscure  the  sharp  lines 
of  their  individuality.  In  Israel,  a  fortiori^  such  a  tendency 
did  not  exist ;  and  that  a  writer  of  Matthew  Arnold's  ability 
should  have  persuaded  himself,  and  tried  to  persuade 
others,  that  under  the  name  of  Yahweh  Israel  understood 
anything  so  vague  as  his  ^'stream  of  tendency  which 
makes  for  righteousness,"  is  only  another  instance  of  the 
extraordinarily  blinding  effects  of  a  preconceived  idea. 
So  far  from  Yahweh  being  conceived  in  that  manner,  it 
would  be  much  easier  to  prove  that,  whatever  aberra- 
tions in  the  direction  of  making  God  merely  "a  non- 
natural  man  "  may  be  charged  upon  Christianity,  they 
have  been  founded  almost  exclusively  upon  Old  Testament 
examples  and  Old  Testament  texts.  If  there  was  defect 
in  the  Old  Testament  conception  of  God,  it  was,  and 
could  not  but  be,  in  the  direction  of  drawing  Him  down 
too  much  into  the  Hmits  of  human  personality. 

But  though  the  gods  were  always  thought  of  by  the 
Canaanites  as  personal,  their  character  was  not  conceived 
as  morally  high.  Moral  character  in  Chemosh,  Moloch, 
or  Baal  was  not  of  much  importance,  and  their  relations 
with  their  peoples  were  never  conditioned  by  moral 
conduct.  How  deeply  ingrained  this  view  was  in 
Palestine  is  seen  in  the  persistency  with  which  even 
Yahweh's  relation  to  His  people  was  viewed  in  this  light. 
Only  the  continual  outcry  of  the  prophets  against  it  pre- 
vented  this   idea   becoming  permanently   dominant    even 


vi.4, 5]  LOVE    TO   GOD   THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  137 

in  Israel.  Nay,  it  often  deceived  would-be  prophets. 
Clinging  to  the  idea  of  the  national  God,  and  forgetting 
altogether  the  ethical  character  of  Yahweh,  without,  per- 
haps, conscious  insincerity,  they  prophesied  peace  to  the 
wicked,  and  so  came  to  swell  the  ranks  of  the  false 
prophets.  But  from  very  early  times  another  thought 
was  cherished  by  Israel's  representative  men  in  regard 
to  their  relations  with  God.  Yahweh  was  righteous, 
and  demanded  righteousness  in  His  people.  Oblations 
were  vain  if  offered  as  a  substitute  for  this.  All  the 
prophets  reach  their  greatest  heights  of  sublimity  in 
preaching  this  ethically  noble  doctrine ;  and  the  love  to 
God  which  Deuteronomy  demands  is  to  be  exhibited  in 
reverent  obedience  to  moral  law. 

Moreover,  that  God  should  seek  or  even  need  the  love 
of  man  threw  other  light  on  the  Old  Testament  religion. 
If,  without  revelation,  Israel  had  widened  its  mental  horizon 
so  as  to  conceive  Yahweh  as  Lord  of  the  world,  it  may 
be  questioned  whether  it  could  have  kept  clear  of  the 
gulf  of  pantheism.  But  by  the  manifestation  of  God  in 
their  special  history,  the  Israelites  had  been  taught  to  rise 
step  by  step  to  the  higher  levels,  without  losing  their 
conception  of  Yahweh  as  the  living,  personal,  active  friend 
of  their  people.  Moreover  they  had  been  early  taught, 
as  we  have  seen,  that  the  deep  design  of  all  that  was 
wrought  for  them  was  the  good  of  all  men.  The  love 
of  God  was  seen  pressing  forward  to  its  glorious  and 
beneficent  ends  ;  and  both  by  ascribing  such  far-reaching 
plans  to  Yahweh,  and  by  affirming  His  interest  in 
the  fate  of  men,  Israel's  conception  of  the  Divine 
personality  was  raised  alike  in  significance  and  power ; 
for  anything  more  personal  than  love  planning  and 
working  towards  the  happiness  of  its  objects  cannot  be 
conceived.  But  the  crown  was  set  upon  the  Divine  per- 
sonality by  the  claim  to  the  love  of  man.     This  signified 


138  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

that  to  the  Divine  mind  the  individual  man  was  not  hid 
from  God  by  his  nation,  that  he  was  not  for  Him  a  mere 
specimen  of  a  genus.  Rather  each  man  has  to  God  a 
special  worth,  a  special  character,  which,  impelled  by  His 
free  personal  love,  He  seeks  to  draw  to  Himself.  At 
every  step  each  man  has  near  him  ^*  the  great  Companion," 
who  desires  to  give  Himself  to  him.  Nay,  more,  it 
implies  that  God  seeks  and  needs  an  answering  love  ; 
so  that  Browning's  daring  declaration,  put  into  the  mouth 
of  God  when  the  song  of  the  boy  Theocrite  is  no  more 
heard,  ''  I  miss  My  little  human  praise,"  is  simple  truth.^ 

But  if  the  demand  illustrates  and  illuminates  the  per- 
sonality of  God,  it  throws  out  in  a  still  more  decisive 
manner  the  personality  of  man.  In  a  rough  sense,  of 
course,  there  never  could  have  been  any  doubt  of  that. 
But  children  have  to  grow  into  full  self-determining  per- 
sonality, and  savages  never  attain  it.  Both  are  at  the 
mercy  of  caprice,  or  of  the  needs  of  the  moment,  to  which 
they  answer  so  helplessly  that  in  general  no  consistent 
course  of  conduct  can  be  expected  of  them.  That  can  be 
secured  only  by  rigorous  self-determination.  But  the 
power  of  self-determination  does  not  come  at  once,  nor 
is  acquired  v/ithout  strenuous  and  continued  effort ;  it  is, 
in  fact,  a  power  which  in  any  full  measure  is  possessed 
only  by  the  civilised  man.  Now  the  Israelites  were  not 
highly  civilised  when  they  left  Egypt.  They  were  still 
at  the  stage  when  the  tribe  overshadowed  and  absorbed 
the  individual,  as  it  does  to-day  among  the  South  Sea 
islanders.  The  progress  of  the  prophetic  thought  to- 
wards the  demand  for  personal  love  has  already  been 
traced.  Here  v/e  must  trace  the  steps  by  which  the 
personal  element  in  each  individual  was  strengthened  in 
Israel,  till  it  was  fit  to  respond  to  the  Divine  demand. 


*  Browning's  Poems,  "  The  Boy  and  the  Angel." 


vi.  4,  5-]  LOVE   TO   GOD    THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  139 

The  high  calling  of  the  people  reacted  on  the  individual 
Israelites.  They  saw  that  in  many  respects  the  nations 
around  them  were  inferior  to  them.  Much  that  was 
tolerated  or  even  respected  among  them  was  an  abomina- 
tion to  Israel ;  and  every  Israelite  felt  that  the  honour  of 
his  people  must  not  be  dragged  in  the  dust  by  him,  as  it 
would  be  if  he  permitted  himself  to  sink  to  the  heathen 
level.  Further,  the  laws  regarding  even  ceremonial 
holiness  which  in  germ  certainl}',  and  probably  in  con- 
siderable extension  also,  existed  from  the  earliest  time, 
made  him  feel  that  the  sanctity  of  the  nation  depended 
upon  the  care  and  scrupulosity  of  the  individual.  And 
then  there  were  the  individual  spiritual  needs,  which  could 
not  be  suppressed  and  would  not  be  denied.  Though 
one  sees  so  little  explicit  provision  for  restoration  of 
individual  character  in  early  Yahwism,  yet  in  the  course 
of  time — who  can  doubt  it  ? — the  personal  religious  needs 
of  so  many  individual  men  would  necessarily  frame  for 
themselves  some  outlet.  Building  upon  the  analogy  of 
the  relation  established  between  Yahweh  and  Israel,  they 
would  hope  for  the  satisfaction  of  their  individual  needs 
through  the  infinite  mercy  of  God.  The  Psalms,  such 
of  them  as  can  fairly  be  placed  in  the  pre-Deuteronomic 
time,  bear  witness  to  this  ;  and  those  written  after  that 
time  show  a  hopefulness,  and  a  faith  in  the  reality  of 
individual  communion  with  God  which  show  that  such 
communion  was  not  then  a  new  discovery. 

In  all  these  ways  the  religious  life  of  the  individual 
was  being  cultivated  and  strengthened ;  but  this  demand 
made  in  T)euteronomy  Hfts  that  indirect  refreshment  of 
soul,  for  which  the  cultus  and  the  covenants  made  no 
special  provision,  into  a  recognised  position,  nay,  into 
the  central  position  in  Israelite  religion.  The  word, 
"  Thou  shalt  love  Yahweh  thy  God,"  confirmed  and 
justified  all  these   persistent   efforts  after  individual   hfe 


I40  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

in  God,  and  brought  them  out  into  the  large  place  which 
belongs  to  aspirations  that  have  at  last  been  authorised. 
By  a  touch,  the  inspired  writer  transformed  the  pious 
hopes  of  those  who  had  been  the  chosen  among  the 
chosen  people  into  certainties,  ^ach  man  was  henceforth 
to  have  his  own  direct  relation  to  God  as  well  as  the 
nation ;  and^the  national  hope,  which  had  hitherto  been 
first,  was  now  to  depend  for  its  realisation  upon  the 
fulfilment  of  the  special ^nd  private  hope.  Thus  the  old 
relation  was  entirely  reversed  by  Deuteronomy.  Instead 
of  the  individual  holding  "  definite  place  in  regard  to 
Yahweh  only  through  his  citizenship,"  now  the  nation 
has  its  place  and  its  future  secured  only  by  the  personal 
love  of  each  citizen  to  God.  For  that  is  obviously  what 
the  demand  here  made  really  means.  Again  and  again 
the  inspired  writer  returns  to  it;  and  his  persistent  en- 
deavour is  to  connect  all  else  that  his  book  contains — 
warning,  exhortation,  legislation — with  this  as  the  founda- 
tion and  starting-point.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  we  can  trace 
the  roots  of  the  new  covenant  which  Jeremiah  and  Ezekiel 
saw  afar  off  and  rejoiced  at,  and  which  our  blessed  Lord 
has  realised  for  us.  The  individual  religious  Hfe  is  for 
the  first  time  fully  recognised  for  what  ever  since  it  has 
been  seen  to  be,  the  first  condition  of  any  attempt  to 
realise  the  kingdom  of  God  in  the  life  of  a  nation. 

And  not  only  thus  does  our  text  emphasise  individuality. 
Love  with  all  the  heart,  and  all  the  mind,  and  all  the  soul 
is  possible  only  to  a  fully  developed  personality  ;  for,  as 
Rothe  says,  ^'  We  love  only  in  the  measure  in  which 
personality  is  developed  in  us.  Even  God  can  love  only  in 
so  far  as  He  is  personal."  ^  Or,  as  JuHus  Muller  says  in  his 
Doctrine  of  Sin,  "  The  association  of  personal  beings  in 
love,  while  it  involves  the  most  perfect  distinction  of  the  I 

'   TheoL,  Ethik  i.,  p.  515. 


vi.4,  5]  LOVE   TO  GOD    THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  141 

and  Thou,  proves  itself  to  be  the  highest  form  of  unity."  ^ 
Unless  other  counteracting  circumstances  come  in,  there- 
fore, the  more  highly  developed  individuality  is,  the  more 
entirely  human  beings  are  determined  from  within,  the 
more  entirely  will  union  among  men  depend  upon  free  and 
deliberate  choice,  and  the  more  perfect  will  it  be.  In 
being  called  to  love  God  men  are  dealt  with  as  those  who 
have  attained  to  complete  self-determination,  who  have 
come  to  completed  manhood  in  the  moral  life.  For  all 
that  could  mix  love  with  alloy,  mere  sensuous  sympathy, 
and  the  insistent  appeal  of  that  which  is  materially  present, 
are  wanting  here.  Here  nothing  is  involved  but  the  free 
outgoing  of  the  heart  to  that  which  is  best  and  highest  ; 
nothing  but  loyalty  to  that  vision  of  Good  which,  amid  all 
the  ruin  sin  has  wrought  in  human  nature,  dominates  us 
so  that  "we  needs  must  love  the  highest  when  we  see 
it."  The  very  demand  is  a  promise  and  a  prophecy  of 
completed  moral  and  religious  liberty  to  the  individual 
soul.  It  rests  upon  the  assurance  that  men  have  at  last 
been  trained  to  walk  alone,  that  the  support  of  social 
life  and  external  ordinances  has  become  less  necessary 
than  it  was,  and  that  one  day  a  new  and  living  way  of 
access  to  the  Father  will  bring  every  soul  into  daily 
intercourse  with  the  source  of  all  spiritual  life. 

But  this  demand,  in  affirming  personality  of  so  high  a 
kind,  also  re-created  duty.  Under  the  national  dispen- 
sation the  individual  man  was  a  servant.  To  a  large 
extent  he  knew  not  what  his  Lord  did,  and  he  ruled  his 
life  by  the  commands  he  received  without  understanding, 
or  perhaps  caring  to  understand,  their  ultimate  ground 
and  aim.  Much  too  of  what  he  thus  laid  upon  himself 
was  mere  ancient  custom,  which  had  been  a  protection 
to  national  and  moral  life  in  early  days,  but  which  had 

*  Doctrine  of  Sin,  vol  i.,  p.  1 14. 


142  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

survived,  or  was  on  the  point  of  surviving,  its  usefulness. 
Now,  however,  that  man  was  called  upon  to  love  God  with 
all  his  heart  and  mind  and  soul,  the  step  was  taken  which 
was  to  end  in  his  becoming  the  consciously  free  son  of 
God.  For  to  love  in  this  fashion  means,  on  the  one  hand, 
a  willingness  to  enter  into  communion  with  God  and  to 
seek  that  communion ;  and  on  the  other  it  implies  a 
throwing  open  of  the  soul  to  receive  the  love  which  God 
so  persistently  has  pressed  upon  men.  In  such  a  relation 
slavery,  blind  or  constrained  obedience,  disappears,  and 
the  motives  of  right  action  become  the  purest  and  most 
powerful  that  man  can  know. 

In  the  first  place,  selfishness  dies  out.  Those  to  whom 
God  has  given  Himself  have  no  more  to  seek.  They 
have  reached  the  dwelling  "  of  peace  imperturbable,"  and 
know  that  they  are  secure.  Nothing  that  they  do  can 
win  more  for  them ;  and  they  do  those  things  that  please 
God  with  the  free,  uncalculating,  ungrudging  forgetful- 
ness  of  self,  which  distinguishes  those  fortunate  children 
who  have  grown  up  into  a  perfect  filial  love.  Of 
course  it  was  only  the  elect  in  Israel  who  in  any  great 
degree  realised  this  ideal.  But  even  those  who  neglected 
it  had  for  a  moment  been  illuminated  by  it ;  and  the 
record  of  it  remained  to  kindle  the  nobler  hearts  of  every 
generation.  Even  the  legalism  of  later  days  could  not 
obscure  it.  In  the  case  of  many  it  bore  up  and  trans- 
figured the  dry  details  of  Judaism,  so  that  even  amid 
such  surroundings  the  souls  of  men  were  kept  alive.  The 
later  Psalms  prove  this  beyond  dispute,  and  the  advanced 
view  which  brings  the  bulk  of  the  Psalter  dovv^n  to  the 
post-exilic  period  only  emphasises  the  more  this  aspect  of 
pre-Christian  Judaism.  In  Christianity  of  course  the  ideal 
was  made  infinitely  m.ore  accessible  :  and  it  received  in  the 
Pauline  doctrine,  the  Evangelical  doctrine,  of  Justification 
by   Faith   a  form,  which    more   than    any    other   human 


vi.4,  5]  LOVE    TO   GOD    THE   LAW  OF  LIFE  143 

teaching  has  made  unselfish  devotion  to  God  a  common 
aim.  It  would  hardly  be  too  much  to  say  that  those  philo- 
sophical and  religious  systems  which  have  preached  the 
unworthiness  of  looking  for  a  reward  of  well-doing,  which 
have  striven  to  set  up  the  doing  of  good  for  its  own  sake 
as  the  only  morality  worthy  of  the  name,  have  failed,  just 
because  they  would  not  begin  with  the  love  of  God.  To 
Christianity,  especially  to  Evangelical  Christianity,  they 
have  assumed  to  speak  from  above  downwards ;  but  it 
alone  has  the  secret  they  strove  in  vain  to  learn.  Men 
justified  by  faith  have  peace  with  God,  and  do  good  with 
passionate  fervour  without  hope  or  possibility  of  further 
reward,  just  because  of  their  love  and  gratitude  to  God 
who  is  the  source  of  all  good.  This  plan  has  succeeded, 
and  no  other  has ;  for  to  teach  men  on  any  other  terms  to 
disregard  reward  is  simply  to  ask  them  to  breathe  in  a 
vacuum. 

In  the  second  place,  those  who  rose  to  the  height  of  this 
calling  had  duty  not  only  deepened  but  extended.  It 
was  natural  that  they  should  not  seek  to  throw  off  the 
obligations  of  worship  and  morality  as  they  had  been 
handed  dov/n  by  their  ancestors.  Only  an  authoritative 
voice  which  they  were  separated  from  by  centuries  could 
say,  ''  It  hath  been  said  by  them  of  old  time,  .  .  .  but  /  say 
unto  you "  ;  and  men  would  be  disposed  rather  to  fulfil 
old  obligations  with  new  zeal,  while  they  added  to 
them  the  new  duties  which  their  widened  horizon  had 
brought  into  view.  It  is  true  that  in  course  of  time  the 
Pharisaic  spirit  laid  hold  of  the  Jews,  and  that  by  it 
they  were  led  back  into  a  slavery  which  quite  surpassed 
the  half-conscious  bondage  of  their  earlier  time.  It  is 
one  of  the  mysteries  of  human  nature  that  it  is  only  the 
few  who  can  live  for  any  time  at  a  high  level,  and  hold 
the  balance  between  extremes.  The  many  cannot  choose 
but  follow  those  few ;  and  the  dumb,  half-reluctant,  half- 


144  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

fascinated  way  in  which  they  are  drawn  after  them  is  a 
most  pathetic  thing  to  see.  But  too  often  they  avenge 
themselves  for  the  pressure  put  upon  them,  by  taking 
up  the  teaching  they  receive  in  a  perverted  or  mutilated 
form,  dropping  unawares  the  very  soul  of  it,  and  suiting 
it  to  the  average  man.  When  that  is  done  the  bread 
from  heaven  becomes  a  stone  ;  the  message  of  liberty 
is  turned  into  a  summons  to  the  prison  house ;  and  the 
darkness  becomes  of  that  opaque  sort  which  is  found  only 
where  the  light  within  men  is  darkness.  That  tragedy 
was  enacted  in  Judaism  as  rarely  elsewhere.  The  free 
service  of  sons  was  exchanged  for  the  timorous,  anxious 
scrupulosity  of  the  formalist.  How  could  men  love  a 
God  whom  they  pictured  as  inexorable  in  claiming  the 
mint  and  cummin  of  ceremonial  worship,  and  as  making 
life  a  burden  for  all  who  had  a  conscience  ?  They  could 
not,  and  they  did  not.  Most  substituted  a  merely 
formal  compliance  with  the  externalities  of  worship  for  the 
love  to  God  and  man  which  was  the  presupposition  of 
the  true  Israelite's  life,  and  the  mass  of  the  nation  fell 
away  from  true  faith.  Strangely  enough,  therefore,  the 
strength  of  men's  love  for  God,  and  of  their  belief  in  His 
love,  gave  an  impulse  to  the  legalistic  Pharisaism  which 
our  Lord  denounced  as  the  acme  of  loveless  irreligion. 

But  it  was  not  so  perverted  in  all.  There  always 
was  an  Israel  within  Israel  that  refused  to  let  go  the 
truths  they  had  learned,  and  kept  up  the  succession  of 
men  inspired  by  the  free  spirit  of  God.  Even  among  the 
Pharisees  there  were  such — witness  St.  Paul — men  who, 
though  they  were  entangled  in  the  formalism  of  their  time, 
found  it  at  last  a  pedagogue  to  bring  them  unto  Christ. 
We  must  believe  therefore  that  at  the  beginning  the 
attainment  marked  by  the  demands  of  Deuteronomy  and 
the  Law  of  Holiness  existed  and  was  carried  over  into 
the   daily  life.     As  the   national   limits   of  religion  were 


vi.4, 5-]  LOVE   TO   GOD    THE  LAW  OF  LIFE  145 


broken  down,  the  word  "  neighbour "  received  an  ever 
wider  definition  in  Israel.  At  first  only  a  man's  fellow- 
tribesman  or  fellow-countryman  was  included ;  then 
the  stranger ;  later,  as  in  Jonah's  picture  of  the  con- 
duct of  the  sailors,  it  was  hinted  that  even  among  the 
heathen  brethren  might  be  found.  Finally,  in  our  Lord's 
parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan  the  last  barrier  was  broken 
down.  But  it  needed  all  St.  Paul's  lifework,  and  the  first 
and  most  desperate  inner  conflict  Christianity  had  to  live 
through,  to  initiate  men  into  anything  like  the  full 
meaning  of  what  Christ  had  taught.  Then  it  was  seen 
that  as  there  was  but  one  Father  in  heaven,  so  there  was 
but  one  family  on  earth.  Then  too,  though  the  merely 
ceremonial  duties  by  which  the  Jew  had  been  bound 
ceased  to  be  binding  on  Christians,  the  sphere  for  the 
practice  of  moral  duty  was  immensely  widened.  Indeed, 
had  it  not  been  for  the  free,  joyous  spirit  with  which 
they  were  inspired  by  Christ,  they  must  have  shrunk 
from  the  immensity  of  their  obligation.  For  not  only 
were  men's  neighbours  infinitely  more  numerous  now, 
but  their  relations  with  them  became  vastly  more  com- 
plicated. To  meet  all  possible  cases  that  might  arise 
in  the  great  and  elaborate  civihsations  Christianity  had 
to  face  and  save,  our  Lord  deepened  the  meaning  of  the 
commandments  ;  and  so  far  from  Christians  being  free  from 
the  obligation  to  law,  immeasurably  more  was  demanded 
of  them.  To  them  first  was  the  full  sweep  of  moral 
obligation  revealed,  for  they  first  had  reached  the  full 
moral  stature  of  men  in  Jesus  Christ. 


10 


CHAPTER  VIII 

EDUCATION— MOSAIC  VIEW 

Deut.  vi.  6-25 

THOSE  great  verses,  Deut.  vi.  4,  5,  form  the  central 
truth  of  the  book.  Everything  else  in  it  proceeds 
from  and  is  informed  by  them,  and  they  are  dwelt 
upon  and  enforced  with  a  clear  perception  of  their 
radical  importance.  There  is  something  of  the  joy  of 
discovery  in  the  way  in  which  the  unity  of  Yahweh  and 
exclusive  love  to  Him  are  insisted  upon,  not  only  in 
verses  6-25  of  this  chapter,  but  in  xi.  13-20.  The  same 
strongly  worded  demand  to  lay  to  heart  Yahweh's  com- 
mand to  love  Him  and  Him  only,  and  to  teach  it 
strenuously  to  their  children — to  make  it  "  a  sign  upon 
their  hand,"  and  ''  as  a  frontlet  between  their  eyes  " — is 
found  in  both  passages.  It  is  worthy  of  remark  also  that 
nearly  the  same  words  are  found  in  Exod.  xiii.  9,  16. 
Presumably  on  a  count  of  this,  some  have  ascribed  that 
section  of  Exodus  to  the  author  of  Deuteronomy.  But 
both  Dillmann  and  Driver  ascribe  these  passages  to 
J  and  E,  and  with  good  reason.  Indeed,  apart  from  the 
purely  literary  grounds  for  thinking  that  these  formulas 
were  first  used  by  the  earlier  writers  and  were  copied 
by  the  author  of  Deuteronomy,  another  line  of  argument 
points  in  the  same  direction.  In  Exodus  the  thing  to  be 
remembered  and  taught  to  the  children  was  the  meaning 

146 


vi.6-2S.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC  VIEIV  I47 

and  origin  of  the  Passover  and  the  consecration  of  the 
firstborn,  i.e.  the  meaning  and  origin  of  some  of  their 
ritual  institutions.  Here  in  Deuteronomy,  on  the  con- 
trary, that  which  is  to  be  written  on  the  heart  and 
taught  to  the  children  is  moral  and  spiritual  truth  about 
God,  and  love  to  God.  Now  the  probable  explanation 
of  this  likeness  and  difference  is,  not  that  the  author  of 
Deuteronomy,  after  using  this  insistive  phrase  only  of 
high  spiritual  truths  in  his  own  book,  inserted  it  in 
Exodus  with  regard  to  mere  institutions  of  the  cultus  ; 
rather,  the  writers  of  Exodus  had  used  it  of  that  which 
was  important  in  their  day,  and  the  Deuteronomist  bor- 
rowed it  from  them  to  emphasise  his  own  most  cherished 
revelation.  In  the  earlier  stages  of  a  religious  move- 
ment, the  establishment  of  institutions  which  shall 
embody  and  perpetuate  religious  truth,  is  one  of  the  fir^t 
necessities.  It  has  become  a  commonplace  of  Christian 
defence,  for  example,  that  Baptism  and  the  Lord's  Supper 
were  made  the  most  successful  vehicles  for  conveying 
fundamental  Christian  truth,  and  that  the  celebration  of 
these  two  rites  from  the  first  days  even  until  now  is 
one  of  the  most  convincing  proofs  of  the  continuity  of 
Christianity.  Naturally,  therefore,  the  establishment  of 
the  Passover  was  specially  marked  out  as  the  palladium 
of  Israelite  religion  in  the  earlier  days.  But  in  the 
time  after  Isaiah,  when  Deuteronomy  was  written,  the 
institutions  needed  no  longer  such  insistence.  They  had 
indeed  become  so  important  to  the  people  that  the  mere 
observance  of  them  threatened  to  become  a  substitute  for 
religious  and  even  moral  feeling.  The  Deuteronomist's 
great  message  was,  consequently,  a  reiteration  of  the 
prophetic  truths  as  to  the  supremacy  of  the  spiritual;  and 
for  the  object  of  the  warm  exhortation  of  the  earlier 
writings  he  substituted  the  proclamation  of  Yahweh's 
oneness,  and  of  His  demand  for  His  people's  love*     This 


148  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

seems  a  reasonable  and  probable  explanation  of  the  facts 
as  we  find  them.  If  true,  it  is  a  proof  that  the  need 
of  ritual  institutions,  and  the  danger  of  unduly  exalting 
them,  was  not  pecuHar  to  post-exilic  times.  In  principle 
the  temptation  was  always  present ;  and  as  living  faith 
rose  and  fell  it  came  into  operation,  or  was  held  in 
abeyance,  throughout  the  whole  of  Israel's  history.  Hence 
the  mention  of  this  kind  of  formalism  or  the  denuncia- 
tion of  it  must  be  very  cautiously  used  as  a  criterion 
by  which  to  date  any  Scriptural  writings. 

It  is  therefore  with  a  full  consciousness  of  its 
fundamental  importance  that  the  author  of  Deuteronomy 
follows  the  great  passage  chapter  vi.  4,  5,  with  this 
solemn  and  inspiring  exhortation.  It  is  from  no  mere 
itch  for  religious  improvement  of  the  occasion  that  he 
presses  home  his  message  thus.  Nor  is  it  love  for  the 
mere  repetition  of  an  ancient  formula  of  exhortation  that 
dictates  its  use.  He  knew  and  understood  the  work  of 
Moses,  and  felt  that  the  moulding  power  in  Israel's  life 
as  a  nation,  the  unifying  element  in  it,  had  been  the 
religion  of  Yahweh.  Whatever  else  may  have  been 
called  in  question,  it  has  never  been  doubted  that  the  salt 
which  kept  the  pohtical  and  social  life  of  the  people 
from  rotting  through  many  centuries  was  the  always 
advancing  knowledge  of  God.  At  each  great  crisis  of 
Israel's  history  the  religion  of  Yahweh  had  met  the 
demands  for  direction,  for  inspiration,  for  uplifting  which 
were  made  upon  it.  With  Protean  versatility  it  had 
adapted  itself  to  every  new  condition.  In  all  circum- 
stances it  had  provided  a  lamp  for  the  feet  and  a  light 
for  the  path  of  the  faithful ;  and  in  meeting  the  needs  of 
generation  after  generation  it  had  revealed  elements  of 
strength  and  consolation  which,  without  the  commentary 
of  experience,  could  never  have  been  brought  out.  Now 
the  author  of  Deuteronomy  felt  that  in  these  short  sentences 


vi.  6-25.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEW 


149 


the  high-water  mark  of  IsraeHte  religion  so  far  had  been 
reached,  and  that  in  renewing  the  work  of  Moses,  and 
adapting  it  to  his  own  time,  the  principles  here  enunciated 
must  be  the  main  burden  of  his  message.  Further  pro- 
gress depended,  he  obviously  felt,  upon  the  absorption  and 
assimilation  of  these  truths  by  his  people,  and  he  felt  he 
must  provide  for  the  perpetuation  of  them  in  that  better 
time  he  was  preparing  for.  This  he  did  by  providing  for 
the  religious  education  of  the  young.  Whatever  else 
Israel  had  gained  it  had  been  careful  to  hand  on  from 
generation  to  generation.  The  land  flowing  with  milk 
and  honey  was  still  in  the  possession  of  the  descendants 
of  the  first  conquerors.  The  literature,  the  science,  the 
wisdom  that  the  fathers  had  gathered,  had  been  carefully 
passed  down  to  the  children  ;  and  a  precious  deposit  of 
enriching  experience  in  the  form  of  history  had  reached 
to  the  elect  even  among  the  common  people,  as  the  ex- 
ample of  Amos  shows.  But  the  most  valuable  heritage 
of  Israel  was  that  continually  growing  deposit  of  religious 
truth  which  had  been  the  life-blood  of  its  master  spirits. 
From  generation  to  generation  the  noblest  men  in  the 
nation,  those  most  sensitive  to  the  touch  of  the  Divine,  had 
been  casting  soundings  into  the  great  deep  of  the  hidden 
purposes  of  God.  With  sore  travail  of  both  mind  and 
spirit,  they  had  found  solutions  of  the  great  problems 
which  no  living  soul  can  escape.  These  were  no  doubt 
more  or  less  partial,  but  they  were  sufficient  for  their  day, 
and  were  always  in  the  Hne  of  the  final  answer.  As  the 
sum  of  experience  widened,  the  scope  of  the  solutions 
widened  also,  and  in  the  course  of  Providence  these  issued 
in  a  conception  of  God  which  elsewhere  was  never  ap- 
proached. This  of  all  national  treasures  was  the  most 
priceless,  and  to  preserve  and  hand  on  this  was  simply 
to  keep  the  national  soul  ahve.  Compared  with  this, 
every  other  heritage  from  the  past  was  as  nothing  ;  and  so, 


150  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

with  a  simple  directness  which  must  amaze  the  legislators 
of  modern  states,  the  inspired  lawgiver  arranged  for  a 
religious  education. 

To  him,  as  to  all  ancient  lawgivers,  a  commonwealth 
without  religion  was  simply  inconceivable,  and  the  hamper- 
ing, confusing,  and  confused  difficulties  of  to-day  lay  far 
beyond  his  horizon.  Parents  must  take  over  this  great 
heritage  and  lay  it  deeply  to  heart.  They  must  then 
make  it  the  subject  of  their  common  talk.  They  must 
write  the  profound  words  which  summed  it  up  upon  the 
doorposts  of  their  houses.  They  must  let  it  fill  their 
minds  at  their  down-sitting  and  their  uprising,  and  while 
they  walked  by  the  way.  Further,  as  the  crown  of  their 
work,  they  were  to  teach  it  diligently  to  their  children, 
already  accustomed  by  their  parents'  continual  interest 
to  regard  this  as  the  worthiest  object  of  human  thought. 
But  though  the  parents  were  to  be  the  chief  instructors  of 
children  in  religion,  the  State  or  the  community  was  also 
to  do  its  part.  As  the  private  citizen  was  to  write,  "  Hear, 
O  Israel :  Yahweh  our  God  is  one  Yahweh ;  and  thou 
shalt  love  Yahweh  thy  God  with  all  thine  heart,  and  with 
all  thy  soul,  and  with  all  thy  might,"  on  the  posts  of  his 
door,  so  the  representatives  of  the  community  were  to 
write  them  upon  the  town  or  village  gates.  In  those 
early  days  schools  were  unknown,  as  State-regulated 
schools  are  still  unknown  in  all  purely  Eastern  countries. 
Consequently  there  was  no  sphere  for  the  State  in 
the  direct  religious  teaching  of  the  young.  But  so  far 
as  it  could  act,  the  State  was  to  act.  It  was  to  commit 
itself  to  the  religious  principles  that  underlay  the  life  of 
the  people,  and  to  proclaim  them  with  the  utmost  publicity. 
It  was  to  secure  that  none  should  be  ignorant  of  them,  so 
far  as  proclamation  by  writing  in  the  most  public  place 
could  secure  knowledge,  for  on  this  the  very  existence  of 
the  State  depended. 


vi.  6-25.]  EDUCATION—MOSAIC   VIEW  151 

But  the  religious  instruction  was  not  to  be  limited  to 
the  reiteration  of  these  great  sentences  ;  in  that  case  they 
would  have  become  a  mere  form  of  words.  In  the  last 
verses  of  the  chapter,  vv.  20-25,  we  find  a  model  of  the  kind 
of  explanatory  comment  which  was  to  be  given  in  addition  : 
"When  thy  son  asketh  thee  in  time  to  come,  saying, 
What  mean  the  testimonies,  and  the  statutes,  and  the 
judgments,  which  Yahweh  our  God  hath  commanded 
you  ?  then  thou  shalt  say  unto  thy  son,  We  were 
Pharaoh's  bondmen  in  the  land  of  Egypt;  and  Yahweh 
brought  us  out  of  Egypt  with  a  mighty  hand,"  and  so  on. 
That  means  that  the  history  of  Yahweh's  dealings  with 
His  people  was  to  be  taught,  to  show  the  reasonableness 
of  the  Divine  commands,  to  exhibit  the  love-compelling 
character  of  God.  And  this  was  entirely  in  accord  with 
the  Biblical  conception  of  God.  Neither  here  nor  else- 
where in  the  Old  Testament  arc  there  any  abstract 
definitions  of  His  character.  His  spirituality.  His 
omnipresence,  or  His  omnipotence.  Nor  is  there  any- 
where any  argtiment  to  prove  His  existence.  All  that 
is  postulated,  presupposed,  as  that  which  all  men  believe, 
except  those  who  have  wilfully  perverted  themselves. 
But  the  existence  of  God  with  all  these  great  and 
necessary  attributes  is  undoubtedly  implied  in  what  is 
narrated  of  Yahweh's  dealings  with  His  people.  As  we 
have  seen,  too,  the  very  name  of  Yahweh  implies  that 
His  nature  should  not  be  limited  by  any  definition.  He 
was  what  He  would  prove  Himself  to  be,  and  throughout 
the  Old  Testament  the  gesta  Dei  through  and  for  the 
Israelites,  and  the  prophetic  promises  made  in  Yahweh's 
name,  represented  all  that  was  known  of  God.  This 
gave  a  peculiarly  healthy  and  robust  tone  to  Old  Testa- 
ment piety.  The  subjective,  introspective  element  which 
in  modern  times  is  so  apt  to  take  the  upper  hand,  was 
kept   in   due   subordination   by  making  history  the  main 


152  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

nourishment  of  religious  thought.  In  constant  contact 
with  external  fact,  Israelite  piety  was  simple,  sincere,  and 
practical ;  and  men's  thoughts  being  turned  away  from 
themselves  to  the  Divine  action  in  the  world,  they  were 
less  touched  by  the  disease  of  self-consciousness  than 
modern  believers  in  God.  In  every  sphere  of  human 
life,  too,  they  looked  for  God,  and  traced  the  working 
of  His  hand.  The  later  distinction  between  the  sacred 
and  secular  parts  of  life,  which  has  been  often  pushed  to 
disastrous  extremes,  was  to  them  unknown.  For  these 
among  many  other  reasons,  the  Old  Testament  must 
always  remain  of  vital  importance  to  the  Church  of  God. 
It  can  fall  into  neglect  only  when  the  religious  life  is 
becoming  unhealthy  and  one-sided. 

Further,  its  qualities  especially  fit  it  for  use  in  the 
education  of  children.  In  many  respects  a  child's  mind 
resembles  the  mind  of  a  primitive  people.  It  has  the 
same  love  of  concrete  examples,  the  same  incapacity  to 
appreciate  abstract  ideas,  and  it  has  the  same  susceptibility 
to  such  reasoning  as  this  :  God  has  been  very  loving  and 
gracious  to  men,  especially  to  our  forefathers,  and  we 
are  therefore  bound  to  love  Him  and  to  obey  Him  with 
reverence  and  fear.  To  the  children  of  a  primitive  people 
such  teaching  would  therefore  be  doubly  suitable  ;  but  the 
Deuteronomist's  anxiety  in  regard  to  it  has  been  justified 
by  its  results  in  times  no  longer  primitive.  Through  ages 
of  persecution  and  oppression,  often  amid  a  social  environ- 
ment of  the  worst  sort,  there  has  been  little  or  no  wavering 
in  the  fundamental  points  of  Jewish  faith.  Scattered  and 
peeled,  slaughtered  and  decimated,  as  they  have  been 
through  blood-stained  centuries,  this  nation  have  held  fast 
to  their  religion.  Not  even  the  fact  that,  through  their 
refusal  to  accept  their  Messiah  when  He  came,  the  most 
tender,  the  most  expansive,  the  most  highly  spiritual 
elements   of  the   Old   Testament  religion   have   escaped 


vi.  6-25.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEW  153 

them,  has  been  able  to  neutralise  the  benefit  of  the  truth 
they  have  so  tenaciously  held.  Of  non-Christian  nations 
they  stand  by  far  the  highest ;  and  among  the  orthodox 
Jews  who  still  keep  firm  to  the  national  traditions,  and 
teach  the  ancient  Scriptures  diligently  to  their  children, 
there  is  often  seen  a  piety  and  a  confidence  in  God,  a 
submission  and  a  hopefulness  which  put  to  shame  many 
who  profess  to  have  hope  in  Christ.  Even  in  our  day, 
when  agnosticism  and  denial  of  the  supernatural  is  eating 
into  Judaism  more  than  into  almost  any  other  creed,^ 
a  book  like  Friedlander's  The  Jewish  Religion  gives  us 
a  very  favourable  idea  of  the  spirit  and  teachings  of 
orthodox  Judaism.  And  its  main  stay  is,  and  always 
has  been,  the  religious  training  of  the  young.  "  In 
obedience  to  the  precept  '  Thou  shalt  speak  of  them,' 
i.e.  of  'the  words  which  I  command  thee  this  day,'"  says 
Friedlander,  '^ '  when  thou  liest  down  and  when  thou  risest 
up,'  three  sections  of  the  law  are  read  daily,  in  the 
morning  and  in  the  evening,  viz.  (i)  Deut.  vi.  4-9,  be- 
ginning 'Hear';  (2)  Dcut.  xi.  13-21,  beginning  'And  it 
shall  be  if  ye  diligently  hearken';  (3)  Numb.  xv.  37-41, 
beginning  '  And  the  Lord  said.'  The  first  section  teaches 
the  unity  of  God,  and  our  duty  to  love  this  one  God  with 
all  our  heart,  to  make  His  word  the  subject  of  our 
constant  meditation  and  to  instil  it  into  the  heart  of 
the  young.  The  second  section  contains  the  lesson  of 
reward  and  punishment,  that  our  success  depends  on  our 
obedience  to  the  will  of  God.  This  important  truth  must 
constantly  be  kept  before  our  eyes,  and  before  the  eyes 
of  our  children.  The  third  section  contains  the  command- 
ments of  Tsitsith,  the  object  of  which  is  to  remind  us  of 
God's  precepts."     To-day,  therefore,  as  so  many  centuries 

'  Jeivish  Quarterly  Review^  October  1888,  p.  55,  where  Professor 
Schechter  finds  himself  compelled  to  discuss  the  question  whether  a  man 
may  be  a  good  Jew  and  yet  deny  the  existence  of  God. 


154  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

ago,  these  great  words  are  uttered  daily  in  the  ears  of  all 
pious  Jews,  and  they  are  as  potent  to  keep  them  steady 
to  their  faith  now  as  they  were  then.  For  in  most  cases 
where  a  drift  towards  the  fashionable  agnosticism  of  the 
day  or  to  atheistic  materialism  is  observable  among  Jews, 
it  will  be  found  to  have  been  preceded  either  by  neglect  or 
formalism  in  regard  to  this  fundamental  matter.  Briefly, 
without  this  teaching  they  cease  to  be  Jews ;  with  it 
they  remain  steadfast  as  a  rock.  Uprooted  as  they  are 
from  their  country,  their  national  coherence  endures  and 
seems  likely  to  endure  till  their  set  time  has  come.  So 
triumphantly  has  the  enforcement  of  religious  education 
vindicated  itself  in  the  case  of  God's  ancient  people. 

In  the  remaining  verses  of  the  chapter,  vv.  1 019,  we 
have  a  warning  against  neglect  and  forgetfulness  of  their 
God,  and  an  indication  of  the  circumstances  under  which 
it  would  be  most  difficult  to  remain  true  to  Him.  These 
are  uttered  entirely  from  the  Mosaic  standpoint,  and  are 
among  the  passages  which  it  is  most  difficult  to  reconcile 
with  the  later  authorship ;  for  there  would  appear  to  be  no 
motive  for  the  later  writer  to  go  back  upon  the  exceptional 
circumstances  of  the  early  days  in  Canaan.  His  object 
must  have  been  to  warn  and  guide  and  instruct  tho  people 
of  his  time  in  the  face  of  their  difficulties  and  temptations, 
to  adapt  Mosaic  legislation  and  Mosaic  teaching  to  the 
needs  of  his  own  day.  Now  on  any  supposition  he  must 
have  written  when  all  conquest  on  Israel's  part  had  long 
ceased.  It  is  most  probable  too  that  in  his  day  the 
prosperity  of  his  people  was  on  the  wane.  They  were 
not  looking  forward  to  a  time  of  special  temptation  from 
riches ;  rather  they  were  dreading  expatriation  and  decay. 
Consequently  this  reference  to  the  ease  with  which  they 
became  rich  by  occupying  the  cities  and  villages  and  farms 
of  those  they  had  conquered  is  quite  out  of  place,  unless 
we  are  to  regard  the  author  as  a  skilled  and  artistic  writer 


vi.6-25.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEW  155 

who  deliberately  set  himself  to  reproduce  in  all  respects 
the  mind  and  thoughts  of  a  man  of  an  earlier  day,  as 
Thackeray,  for  instance,  does  in  his  Henry  Esmond, 
But  that  is  not  credible ;  and  the  explanation  is  that  given 
in  Chapter  I.,  that  the  addresses  here  attributed  to  Moses 
are  free  reproductions  of  earlier  traditions  or  narratives 
concerning  vi^hat  Moses  actually  said.  If  we  know  any- 
thing about  Moses  at  all,  it  is  in  the  highest  degree 
probable  that  he  left  his  people  some  parting  charge.  He 
longed  to  pass  the  Jordan  with  them.  He  could  not  fail 
to  see  that  an  immense  revolution  in  their  habits  and 
manner  of  life  was  certain  to  occur  when  they  entered  the 
promised  land.  That  must  have  appeared  to  him  fraught 
with  varied  dangers,  and  words  of  warning  and  instruc- 
tions would  rush  even  unbidden  to  his  lips. 

There  can  be  no  doubt,  at  any  rate,  that  this  passage 
is  true  to  human  nature  in  regarding  the  sudden  acquire- 
ment of  great  and  goodly  cities  which  they  did  not  build, 
and  houses  full  of  good  things  which  they  filled  not,  and 
cisterns  hewn  out  which  they  did  not  hew,  vineyards  and 
olive  trees  which  they  did  not  plant,  as  a  great  tempta- 
tion to  forgetfulness  of  God.  At  all  times  prosperity, 
especially  if  it  come  suddenly,  and  without  being  won  by 
previous  toil  and  self-denial,  has  tended  to  deteriorate 
character.  When  men  have  no  changes  or  vicissitudes, 
then  they  fear  not  God.  It  is  for  help  in  trouble  when 
the  help  of  man  is  vain,  or  for  a  deliverance  in  danger, 
that  average  men  most  readily  turn  to  God.  But  when 
they  feel  fairly  safe,  when  they  have  raised  themselves, 
as  they  think,  ''  beyond  all  storms  of  chance,"  when  they 
have  built  up  between  themselves  and  poverty  or  failure 
a  wall  of  wealth  and  power,  then  the  impulse  that  drives 
them  upward  ceases  to  act.  It  becomes  strangely  plea- 
sant, and  it  seems  safe,  to  get  rid  of  the  strain  of  living 
at  the  highest  attainable  level,  and  with  a  sigh  of  relief 


156  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

men  stretch  themselves  out  to  rest  and  to  enjoy.  These 
are  the  average  men ;  but  there  are  some  in  every  age,  the 
elect,  who  have  had  the  love  of  God  shed  abroad  in  their 
hearts,  who  have  had  such  real  and  intimate  communion 
with  God  that  separation  from  Him  would  turn  all  other 
joys  into  mockery.  They  cannot  yield  to  this  temptation 
as  most  do,  and  in  the  midst  of  wealth  and  comfort  keep 
alive  their  aspirations.  In  Israel  these  two  classes 
existed ;  and  to  the  former,  i.e.  to  the  great  bulk  of  both 
rulers  and  people,  the  stimulus  administered  by  the 
conquest  to  the  material  side  of  their  nature  must  have 
been  potent  indeed. 

It  is  here  implied  that  the  Israelite  people  when  they 
entered  Canaan  had  some  moral  education  to  lose. 
Whether  that  could  be  so  is  the  question  asked  by 
many  critics,  and  their  answer  is  an  emphatic  No.  They 
were,  say  they,  a  rude,  desert  people,  without  settled 
habits  of  life,  without  knowledge  of  agriculture,  and 
possessed  of  a  religion  which  in  all  outward  respects  was 
scarcely,  if  at  all,  higher  than  that  of  the  surrounding 
nations.  What  happened  to  them  in  Canaan,  therefore, 
was  not  a  lapse,  but  a  rise.  They  advanced  from  being 
a  wandering  pastoral  people  to  become  settled  agricul- 
turists. They  gained  knowledge  of  the  arts  of  life  by 
their  contact  with  the  Canaanites,  and  they  lost  little  or 
nothing  in  religion ;  for  they  were  themselves  only  image- 
worshippers  and  looked  upon  Yahweh  as  on  a  level 
with  the  Canaanite  Baals.  But  if  the  Decalogue  belongs, 
in  any  form,  to  that  early  time,  and  if  the  character  of 
Moses  be  in  any  degree  historical,  then,  of  course,  this 
mode  of  view  is  false.  Then  Israel  worshipped  a  spiritual 
God,  who  was  the  guardian  of  morals  ;  and  there  was 
in  the  mind  of  their  leader  and  legislator  a  light  which 
illuminated  every  sphere  of  life,  both  private  and  national. 
Consequently  there  could  be  a  falling  away  from  a  higher 


vi.  6-25.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEW  157 

level  of  religious  life,  as  the  Scriptures  consistently  say 
there  was.  Without  perhaps  having  understood  and 
made  their  own  the  fundamental  truths  of  Yahwism, 
the  people  had  had  their  whole  social  and  political  life 
remodelled  in  accordance  with  its  principles.  They  had, 
moreover,  had  time  to  learn  something  of  its  inner 
meaning,  and  in  forty  years  we  may  well  believe  that 
the  more  spiritually  minded  among  them  had  become 
imbued  with  the  higher  religious  spirit.  Add  to  that 
the  union,  the  movement,  the  excitement  of  a  successful 
advance,  crowned  by  conquest,  and  we  have  all  the 
elements  of  a  revived  religious  and  national  life  among 
Eastern  people. 

Similar  causes  have  produced  precisely  similar  effects 
since.  In  important  respects  the  origin  of  Mohammedanism 
repeats  the  same  stery.  A  semi-nomadic  people,  divided 
into  clans  and  tribes,  related  by  blood  but  never  united, 
were  unified  by  a  great  religious  idea  vastly  in  advance  of 
any  they  had  hitherto  known.  The  religious  reformer 
who  proclaimed  this  truth,  and  those  who  belonged  to  the 
inner  circle  of  his  friends  and  counsellors,  were  turned 
from  many  evils,  and  exhibited  a  moral  force  and 
enthusiasm  corresponding,  in  some  degree  at  least,  to  the 
sublimity  of  the  religious  doctrine  they  had  embraced. 
The  masses,  on  their  part,  received  and  submitted  to  a 
revised  and  improved  scheme  of  social  life.  Then  they 
moved  forward  to  conquest,  and  in  their  first  days  not  only 
trampled  down  opposition,  but  deserved  to  do  so,  for  in 
most  respects  they  were  superior  to  the  ignorant  and 
degraded  Christians  they  overthrew.  They  came  out  of 
the  desert,  and  were  at  first  soldiers  only.  But  in  a 
generation  or  two  they  largely  settled  to  purely  agricultural 
life,  as  landowners  for  whom  the  native  population 
laboured  ;  and  they  gained  in  knowledge  of  the  arts  of  life 
from  the  more  civilised  peoples  they  conquered.     But  in 


158  THE  BOOK  OT  DEUTERONOMY 

religious  and  moral  character  imitations  of  the  conquered 
peoples  involved,  for  the  conquerors,  a  loss.  And  soon 
they  did  lose.  The  violence  accompanying  successful  war 
produced  arrogance  and  injustice ;  the  immense  wealth 
thrown  into  their  hands  so  suddenly  gave  rise  to  luxury 
and  greed.  Within  twenty-five  years  from  the  flight  of 
Mohammed  from  Mecca,  relaxation  of  manners  manifested 
itself.  Sensuality  and  drunkenness  were  rife ;  with  All's 
death  the  Caliphate  passed  into  the  hands  of  Muawia,  the 
leader  of  the  still  half-heathen  part  of  the  Koreish  ;  and 
the  secular  indifferent  portion  of  Mohammed's  followers 
ruled  in  I  slam.  ^ 

Allowing  all  that  can  be  allowed  for  exceptional 
influences  in  Israel,  we  may  well  believe  that  the  circum- 
stances of  the  first  invaders  were  such  as  would  strain 
the  influence  of  the  higher  religion  upon  the  nation.  And 
aftej  the  conquest  and  settlement  the  strain  would 
necessarily  be  greater  still.  Whatever  drawbacks  warfare 
may  have,  it  at  least  keeps  men  active  and  hardy,  but  the 
rest  of  a  conqueror  after  warfare  is  a  temptation  to  luxury 
and  corruption  which  has  been  very  rarely  resisted.  Even 
to-day,  when  men  enter  upon  new  and  vacant  lands,  and 
that  without  war  and  under  Christian  influences,  the  plenty 
which  the  first  immigrants  soon  gather  about  them  proves 
adverse  to  higher  thought.  In  America  in  its  earher 
days,  and  in  new  American  territories  and  Australia  now, 
our  civilisation  at  that  stage  always  takes  a  materialistic 
turn.  Every  man  may  hope  to  become  rich,  the  resources 
of  the  country  are  so  great  and  those  who  are  to  share 
them  are  so  few.  In  order  to  develop  them,  all  concerned 
must  give  their  time  and  thoughts  to  the  work,  and  must 

*  For  an  illustration  of  the  way  in  which  land-hunger  and  the  rush 
to  satisfy  it  operates  on  men,  see  the  account  of  "The  Invasion  of 
Oklahoma "  (a  territory  lately  thrown  open  to  occupation  in  the  United 
States),  Spectator,  April  27th  1889. 


vi.6-25.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEW  159 

become  absorbed  in  it.  The  result  is  that,  though  the 
religious  instinct  asserts  itself  in  sufficient  strength  to 
lead  to  the  building  of  churches  and  schools,  and  men 
are  too  busy  to  be  much  influenced  by  theoretical  unbelief, 
yet  the  pulse  of  religion  beats  feebly  and  low.  The 
feeling  spreads,  under  many  disguises  it  is  true,  but  still 
it  spreads,  that  a  man's  life  does  "  consist  in  the  abundance 
of  the  things  which  he  possesseth "  ;  and  the  heroic 
element  of  Christianity,  the  impulse  to  self-sacrifice,  falls 
into  the  background.  The  result  is  a  social  life  respectable 
enough,  save  that  the  social  blots  due  to  self-indulgence 
are  a  good  deal  more  conspicuous  than  they  should  be ;  a 
very  high  average  of  general  comfort,  with  its  necessary 
drawback  of  a  self-satisfied  and  somewhat  ignoble  con- 
tentment ;  and  a  religious  life  that  prides  itself  mainly  in 
avoiding  the  falsehood  of  extremes.  In  such  an  atmo- 
sphere true  and  living  religion  has  great  difficulty  in 
asserting  itself  Each  individual  is  drawn  away  from  the 
region  of  higher  thought  more  powerfully  than  in  the  older 
lands  where  ambitions  are  for  most  men  less  plausible ; 
and  so  the  struggle  to  keep  the  soul  sensitive  to  spiritual 
influences  is  more  hard.  As  for  the  national  life,  public 
affairs  in  those  circumstances  tend  to  be  ruled  simpl}' 
by  the  standard  of  immediate  expediency,  and  strenuous- 
ness  of  principle  or  practice  tends  to  be  regarded  as  an 
impossible  ideal. 

To  all  this  Israel  was  exposed,  and  to  more.  There 
are  doubts  as  to  the  extent  of  their  conquests  when  they 
settled  down ;  but  there  are  none  that  when  they  did 
so  they  still  had  heathen  Canaanites  among  them. 
Throughout  almost  the  whole  country  the  population  was 
mixed,  and  constant  intercourse  with  the  conquered 
peoples  was  unavoidable.  At  first  these  were  either  Israel's 
teachers  in  many  of  the  arts  of  settled  life,  or  they  must 
have  carried  on  the  work  of  agriculture  for  their  Israelite 


i6o  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

lords.  Moreover  many  of  the  sacred  places  of  the  land, 
the  sanctuaries  which  from  time  immemorial  had  been 
resorted  to  for  worship,  were  either  taken  over  by  the 
Israelites  or  were  left  in  Canaanite  hands.  In  either 
case  they  opened  a  way  for  malign  influences  upon  the 
purer  faith.  Gradually,  too,  the  tribal  feeling  asserted 
itself  The  tribal  heads  regained  the  position  they  had 
held  before  the  domination  of  Moses  and  his  successor, 
just  as  the  tribal  heads  of  the  Arabs  asserted  themselves 
after  the  death  of  Mohammed  and  his  immediate 
successors,  and  plunged  into  fratricidal  war  with  the 
companions  of  their  prophet.  The  only  difference  was 
that,  while  the  circumstances  of  the  Arabs  compelled  them 
to  retain  a  supreme  head,  the  circumstances  of  the 
Israelites  permitted  them  to  fall  back  into  the  tribal  isola- 
tion from  which  they  had  emerged.  The  national  life  was 
broken  up,  the  religious  life  followed  in  the  same  path, 
until,  as  the  Book  of  Judges  graphically  says  in  narrating 
how  Micah  set  up  an  Ephod  and  Teraphim  for  himself 
and  made  his  son  a  priest,  ''every  man  did  that  which 
was  right  in  his  own  eyes."  With  a  people  so  recently 
won  for  a  higher  faith,  there  could  not  but  follow  a 
recrudescence  of  heathen  or  semi-heathen  beliefs  and 
practices. 

To  sum  up,  given  a  great  truth  revealed  to  one  man, 
which,  though  accepted  by  a  nation,  is  only  half  understood 
by  the  bulk  of  them,  and  given  also  a  great  national 
deliverance  and  expansion  brought  about  by  the  same 
leader,  you  have  there  the  elements  of  a  great  enthusiasm 
with  the  seeds  of  its  own  decay  within  it.  Such  a  nation, 
especially  if  plied  with  external  temptation,  will  fall  back, 
not  into  its  first  state  certainly,  but  into  a  condition  much 
below  its  highest  level,  so  soon  as  the  leader  and  those 
who  had  really  comprehended  the  new  truth  are  removed 
to  a  distance  or  are  dead. 


vi.6-25.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEIV  i6i 

In  the  case  of  Mohammedanism  this  was  instinctively 
felt.  We  find  the  Governor  of  Bassorah  writing  thus 
to  Omar,  the  third  Khalif :  "  Thou  must  strengthen  my 
hands  with  a  company  of  the  Companions  of  the  Prophet, 
for  verily  they  are  as  salt  in  the  midst  of  the  people."  ^ 
The  same  thing  is  expressly  asserted  of  Israel  also  by 
the  later  editor  in  Josh.  xxiv.  31  :  "And  Israel  served 
the  Lord  all  the  days  of  Joshua,  and  all  the  days  of  the 
elders  that  outlived  Joshua,  and  had  known  all  the  work 
of  the  Lord,  that  He  had  wrought  for  Israel."  It  would 
almost  seem  as  if  Semitic  peoples  were  specially  liable  to 
such  oscillations,  if  Palgrave's  account  of  the  people  of 
Nejed  before  the  rise  of  the  Wahabbis  in  the  middle  of 
last  century  can  be  trusted.  "Almost  every  trace  of 
Islam,"  he  says,  ^  "  had  long  since  vanished  from  Nejed, 
where  the  worship  of  the  Djann,  under  the  spreading 
foliage  of  large  trees,  or  in  the  cavernous  recesses  of 
Djebel  Toweyk,  along  with  the  invocation  of  the  dead 
and  sacrifices  at  their  tombs,  was  blended  with  remnants 
of  old  Sabaean  superstition.  The  Coran  was  unread, 
the  five  daily  prayers  forgotten,  and  no  one  cared  where 
Mecca  lay,  east  or  west,  north  or  south ;  tithes,  ablutions, 
and  pilgrimages  were  things  unheard  of"^  If  that 
was  the  state  of  things  in  a  country  exposed  to  no 
extraneous  influences  after  a  thousand  years  of  Islam, 
we   may   well   believe    that    the    state   of   Israel    in   the 


'  The  Caliphate,  by  Sir  William  Muir,  p.  185. 

^  Central  and  Eastern  Arabia,  vol.  i.,  p.  373. 

^  This  shows  how  precarious  the  fundamental  principle  of  much  new 
criticism  is.  The  non-observance  of  rites  laid  down  as  Divine  commands, 
and  the  appearance  of  ancient  superstitions  such  as  the  worship  of  the 
dead  at  any  period,  are  held  sufficient  in  the  history  of  Israel  to  prove 
that  monotheism  did  not  then  exist,  and  that  ancestor-worship  was  then 
the  prevailing  cult.  If  appUed  to  Islam  that  principle  would  lead  to 
utterly  false  conclusions.  Is  there  any  reason  for  thinking  that  it  may 
not  give  similar  results  when  applied  to  the  history  of  Israel  ? 

II 


1 62  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

time  of  the  Judges  was  a  fall  from  a  better  state  re- 
ligiously as  well  as  politically.  Looking  to  the  future, 
Moses  rnight  well  foresee  the  danger ;  and  looking  back 
the  author  of  Deuteronomy  would  have  reasons,  many  of 
them  now  unknown,  for  knowing  that  what  was  feared 
had  occurred. 

It  is  striking  to  see  that  both  know  but  one  security 
against  such  lapses  in  the  life  of  a  nation,  and  that  is 
education.  Nowadays  we  are  inclined  to  ask  if  this  was 
not  a  delusion  on  their  part.  The  boundless  faith  in 
education  as  a  moral,  religious,  and  national  restorative 
which  filled  men's  minds  in  the  early  part  of  this 
century,  has  given  place  to  disquieting  questions  as  to 
whether  it  can  do  anything  so  high.  Many  begin  to 
doubt  whether  it  does  more  than  restrain  men  from 
the  worst  crimes,  by  pointing  out  their  consequences. 
And  in  the  case  of  ordinary  secular  education  that  doubt 
is  only  too  well  founded.  But  it  was  not  mere  secular 
education  the  Old  Testament  relied  on.  Reading,  writing, 
and  arithmetic,  valuable  as  these  are  as  gateways  to 
knowledge,  were  not  in  its  view  at  all.  What  it  was  felt 
necessary  to  do  was  to  keep  alive  an  ideal  view  of  life ; 
and  that  was  done  by  pouring  into  the  young  the  history 
of  their  people,  with  the  best  that  their  highest  minds 
had  learned  and  thought  of  God.  The  demand  is  that 
parents  shall  first  of  all  give  themselves  up  to  the  love  of 
God,  without  any  reserve,  and  then  that  they  shall  teach 
this  diligently  to  their  children  as  the  substance  of  the 
Divine  demand  upon  them.  Evidently  by  the  words, 
'*  Thou  shalt  talk  of  them  when  thou  sittest  in  thine  house, 
and  when  thou  walkest  by  the  way,  and  when  thou  liest 
down  and  when  thou  risest  up,"  it  is  meant  that  the  truth 
about  God  and  the  thought  of  God  should  be  a  subject  on 
which  conversation  naturally  turned,  and  to  which  it 
gladly  returned  continually      Words  about  these  things 


vi.6-25.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEIV  163 

were  to  flow  from  a  genuine  delighted  interest  in  them, 
which  made  speech  a  necessity  and  a  joy.  Further, 
parents  were  to  meet  the  naive  and  questioning  curiosity 
of  their  children  as  to  the  meaning  of  religious  and  moral 
ordinances  of  their  people,  with  grave  and  extended 
teaching  as  to  the  work  of  God  among  them  in  the  past. 
They  were  to  point  out,  vv.  21-25,  all  the  grace  of  God, 
and  to  show  them  that  the  statutes,  which  to  young  and 
undisciphned  minds  might  seem  a  heavy  burden,  were 
really  God's  crowning  mercy :  they  marked  out  the  lines 
upon  which  alone  good  could  come  to  man  :  they  were  the 
directions  of  a  loving  guide  anxious  to  keep  their  feet 
from  paths  of  destruction,  "for  their  good  always."  Such 
education  as  this  might  prove  adequate  to  overcome  even 
stronger  temptations  than  those  to  which  Israel  was 
exposed.  For  see  what  it  means.  It  means  that  all  the 
garnered  religious  thought  and  emotion  of  past  generations, 
which  the  experiences  of  life  and  the  felt  presence  of  God 
in  them  had  borne  in  upon  the  deepest  minds  of  Israel, 
was  to  be  made  the  bounding  horizon  for  the  opening 
mind  of  every  Israelite  child.  When  the  child  looked 
beyond  the  desires  of  its  physical  nature,  it  was  to  see 
this  great  sight,  this  panorama  of  the  grace  of  Yahweh. 
To  compensate  for  the  restrictions  which  the  Decalogue 
puts  upon  the  natural  impulses,  Yahweh  was  to  be  held 
up  to  every  child  as  an  object  of  love,  no  desire  after 
which  could  be  excessive.  Love  to  Yahweh,  drawn  out 
by  what  He  had  shown  Himself  to  be,  was  to  turrr  the 
energies  of  the  young  soul  outward,  away  from  self,  and 
direct  them  to  God,  who  works  and  is  the  sum  of  all  good. 
Obviously  those  upon  whom  such  education  had  its 
perfect  work  would  never  be  fettered  by  the  material 
aspects  of  things.  Their  horizon  could  never  be  so 
darkened  that  the  twilight  gods  worshipped  by  the 
Oanaanites  should   seem  to    them    more   than    dim   and 


1 64  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

vanishing  shadows.     Every  evil,  incident  to  their  circum- 
stances as  conquerors,  would  fall  innocuous  at  their  feet. 

The  instrument  put  into  the  hands  of  Israel  was, 
viewed  ideally,  quite  adequate  for  the  work  it  had  to  do. 
But  the  history  of  Israel  shows  that  the  effort  to  keep 
Yahweh  continually  present  to  the  mind  of  the  people 
failed  ;  and  the  question  arises,  why  did  it  fail  ?  If,  as  we 
have  every  reason  to  believe,  the  main  tendencies  of  human 
nature  then  were  what  they  are  now,  the  first  cause  of 
failure  would  be  with  the  parents.  Many,  probably  the 
most  of  them,  would  observe  to  do  all  that  Moses  com- 
manded, but  they  would  do  it  without  themselves  keeping 
alive  their  spiritual  life.  Wherever  that  was  the  case, 
though  the  prayers  should  be  scrupulously  rehearsed, 
though  the  religious  talk  should  be  increasing,  though 
the  instruction  about  the  past  should  be  exact  and  regular, 
the  highest  results  of  it  all  would  cease  to  appear.  The 
best  that  would  be  done  would  be  to  keep  alive  knowledge 
of  what  the  fathers  had  told  them.  The  worst  would  be 
to  render  the  child's  mind  so  familiar  with  all  aspects  of 
the  truth,  and  with  all  the  phases  of  religious  emotion, 
that  throughout  life  this  would  always  seem  a  region 
already  explored,  and  in  which  no  water  for  the  thirsty 
soul  had  been    found. 

But  in  the  children,  too,  there  would  be  fatal  hindrances. 
One  would  almost  expect,  a  priori,  that  when  one  generation 
had  won  in  trial  and  hardship  and  conquest  a  fund  of 
moral  and  spiritual  wisdom,  their  children  would  be  able 
to  take  it  to  themselves,  and  would  start  from  the  point 
their  fathers  had  attained.  But  in  experience  that  is  not 
found  to  be  so.  The  fathers  may  have  gained  a  sane  and 
strong  manhood  through  the  training  and  teaching  of 
Divine  Providence,  but  their  children  do  not  start  from 
the  level  their  fathers  have  gained.  They  begin  with  the 
same  passions,  and  evil  tendencies,  and  illusions,  as  their 


vi.  6-25-]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEW  165 

fathers  began  with,  and  against  these  they  have  to  wage 
continual  war.  Above  all,  each  soul  for  itself  must  take 
the  great  step  by  which  it  turns  from  evil  to  good.  No 
rise  in  the  general  level  of  life  will  ever  enable  men  to 
dispense  with  that.  The  will  must  determine  itself  morally 
by  a  free  choice,  and  the  Divine  grace  must  play  its  part, 
before  that  union  with  God  which  is  the  heart  of  all 
religion  can  be  brought  about.  No  mechanical  keeping 
up  of  good  habits  or  fairer  forms  of  social  life  can  do 
much  at  this  crucial  point ;  and  so  each  generation  finds 
that  there  is  no  discharge  in  the  war  to  which  it  is 
committed.  As  in  all  wars,  many  fall ;  sometimes  the 
battle  goes  sorely  against  the  kingdom  of  God,  and  the 
majority  fall.  The  strength  and  beauty  of  a  whole  genera- 
tion turns  to  the  world  and  away  from  God,  and  the 
labours  and  prayers  of  faithful  men  and  women  who  have 
taught  them  seem  to  be  in  vain. 

The  method  of  warding  off  evil  by  even  high  religious 
education  is  consequently  very  imperfect  and  uncertain 
in  its  action.  Nevertheless  this  relative  uncertainty  is 
bound  up  with  the  very  nature  of  moral  influence  and 
moral  agency.  Professor  Huxley,  in  a  famous  passage 
of  one  of  his  addresses,  says  that  if  any  being  would  offer 
to  wind  him  up  like  a  clock,  so  that  he  should  always  do 
what  is  right,  and  think  what  is  true,  he  would  close  with 
the  offer,  and  make  no  mourning  about  his  moral  freedom. 
Probably  this  was  only  a  vehement  way  of  expressing 
a  desire  for  righteousness  in  deed,  and  truth  in  thought, 
somewhat  pathetic  in  such  a  man.  But  if  we  are  to  take 
it  literally,  it  is  a  singularly  unwise  declaration.  The 
longing  which  gives  pathos  to  the  professor's  words  would 
on  his  hypothesis  be  a  lunacy ;  for  in  the  realm  of 
morals  mechanical  compulsion  has  no  meaning.  Even 
God  must  give  room  to  His  creature,  that  he  may  exer- 
cise  the  spiritual   freedom   with   which  he   is  endowed. 


1 66  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Even  God,  we  may  say  without  irreverence,  must  some- 
times fail  in  that  which  He  seeks  to  accomplish,  in  the 
field  of  moral  life.  Philosophically  speaking,  perhaps,  this 
statement  cannot  be  defended.  But  it  is  not  the  Absolute 
of  Philosophy  which  can  touch  the  hearts  and  draw  the 
love  of  men.  It  is  the  living,  personal  God,  of  whom 
we  gain  our  best  working  conception  b}^  boldly  trans- 
ferring to  Him  the  highest  categories  predicable  of  our 
humanity.  He  is,  doubtless,  much  more  than  we ;  but  we 
can  only  ascribe  to  Him  our  own  best  and  highest.  When 
we  have  done  that  we  have  approached  Him  as  near  as 
we  can  ever  do.  The  Scriptural  writers,  therefore,  have 
no  pedantic  scruples  in  their  speech  about  God.  They 
constantly  represent  Him  as  pleading  with  men,  desiring 
to  influence  them,  and  yet  sometimes  as  being  driven  back 
defeated  by  the  obstinate  sin  of  man.  The  Bible  is  full 
of  the  failures  of  God  in  this  sense ;  and  God's  greatest 
failure,  that  which  forms  the  burden  and  inspires  the 
pathos  of  the  bulk  of  the  Old  Testament,  is  His  failure 
with  His  chosen  people.  They  would  not  be  saved,  they 
would  not  be  faithful ;  and  God  had  to  accomplish  His 
work  of  planting  the  true  and  spiritual  religion  in  the 
world  by  means  of  a  mere  remnant  of  faithful  men  chosen 
from  a  faithless  multitude. 

But  though  this  plan  failed  miserabty  in  one  way,  in 
the  way  of  gaining  the  bulk  of  the  people,  it  succeeded 
in  another.  As  has  just  been  said,  the  purpose  of  God 
was  in  any  case  accomplished.  But  even  apart  from 
that,  the  religious  education  that  was  given  was  of 
immense  importance.  It  raised  the  level  of  life  for  all ; 
like  the  Nile  mud  in  the  inundation,  it  fertilised  the  whole 
field  of  this  people's  life.  It  kept  an  ideal,  too,  before 
men,  without  which  they  would  have  fallen  even  lower 
than  they  did.  And  it  lay  in  the  minds  of  even  the 
worst,  ready  to   be   changed   into  something  higher*   for 


vi.6-25.]  EDUCATION— MOSAIC   VIEW  167 

without  previous  intellectual  acquaintance  with  the  facts, 
the  deeper  knowledge  was  impossible.  Moreover  the 
ordinary  civil  morality  of  the  people  rested  upon  it. 
Without  their  religion  and  the  facts  on  which  it  was 
based,  the  moral  code  had  no  hold  upon  them,  and  could 
have  none.  That  had  grown  up  in  one  complex  tangle 
with  religion  ;  it  had  received  its  highest  inspiration  from 
the  conception  of  God  handed  down  from  the  fathers ;  and 
apart  from  that  it  would  have  fallen  into  an  incoherent  mass 
of  customs  unable  to  justify  or  account  for  their  existence. 
In  every  community  the  same  principle  holds.  Hence 
whatever  the  theory  of  the  relation  of  the  State  to  religion 
which  may  prevail,  no  State  can,  without  much  harm, 
ignore  the  religion  of  the  people.  It  may  sometimes  even 
be  wise  and  right  for  a  government  to  introduce  or  to 
encourage  a  higher  religion  at  the  expense  of  a  lower. 
But  it  can  never  be  either  wise  or  right  to  be  inadvertent 
of  religion  altogether.  In  accordance  with  this  precept, 
the  rulers  of  Israel  never  were  so.  They  not  only 
encouraged  parents  to  be  strenuous,  as  this  passage 
demands  of  them,  but  on  more  than  one  occasion  they 
made  definite  provision  for  the  religious  instruction  of 
the  people.  In  a  formal  sense  that  grew  into  a  habit 
which  even  yet  has  not  lost  its  hold ;  and  hence,  as  we 
have  seen,  the  Jews  have  been  kept  true  in  an  unexampled 
manner  to  their  racial  and  religious  characteristics. 


CHAPTER    IX 

THE  BAN 
Deut.  vii. 

AS  in  the  previous  chapter  we  have  had  the  Mosaic 
and  Deuteronomic  statement  of  the  internal  and 
spiritual  means  of  defending  the  Israelite  character  and 
faith  from  the  temptations  which  the  conquest  in  Canaan 
would  bring  with  it,  in  this  we  have  strenuous  pro- 
vision made  against  the  same  evil  by  external  means. 
The  mind  first  was  to  be  fortified  against  the  tempta- 
tion to  fall  away  ;  then  the  external  pressure  from  the 
example  of  the  peoples  they  were  to  conquer  was 
to  be  minimised  by  the  practice  of  the  ban.  The  first 
five  verses,  and  the  last  two  deal  emphatically  with 
that,  as  also  does  ver.  i6,  and  what  lies  between  is  a 
statement  of  the  grounds  upon  which  a  strict  execution 
of  this  dreadful  measure  was  demanded.  These,  as  is 
usual  in  Deuteronomy,  are  dealt  with  somewhat  dis- 
cursively ;  but  the  command  as  to  the  ban,  coming  as  it 
does  at  the  beginning,  middle,  and  end,  gives  this 
chapter  unity,  and  suggests  that  it  should  be  treated  under 
this  head  as  a  whole.  There  are  besides  other  passages 
which  can  most  conveniently  be  discussed  in  connection 
with  chapter  vii.  These  are  the  historic  statements 
as  to  the  ban  having  been  laid  upon  the  cities  of  Sihon 
(Deut.  ii.  34)  and  Og  (Deut.  iii.  6) ;  the  provision  for 
the   extirpation   of  idolatrous   persons    and  communities 


vii.]  THE  BAN  169 

(Deut.  xiii.  15);  and  lastly,  that  portion  of  the  law  of  war 
which  treats  of  the  variations  in  the  execution  of  the  ban 
which  circumstances  might  demand  (Deut.  xx.  13-18). 
These  passages,  taken  together,  give  an  almost  exhaustive 
statement  in  regard  to  the  nature  and  limitations  of  the 
Cherem,  or  ban,  in  ancient  Israel,  a  statement  much  more 
complete  than  is  elsewhere  to  be  found ;  and  they  con- 
sequently suggest,  if  they  do  not  demand,  a  complete 
investigation  of  the  whole  matter. 

It  is  quite  clear  that  the  Cherem,  or  ban,  by  which  a 
person  or  thing,  or  even  a  whole  people  and  their  pro- 
perty, were  devoted  to  a  god,  was  not  a  specially  Mosaic 
ordinance,  for  it  is  a  custom  known  to  many  half-civilised 
and  some  highly  civilised  nations.  In  Livy's  account  of 
early  Rome  we  read  that  Tarquinius,  after  defeating  the 
Sabines,  burned  the  spoils  of  the  enemy  in  a  huge  heap,  in 
accordance  with  a  vow  to  Vulcan,  made  before  advancing 
into  the  Sabine  country.  The  same  custom  is  alluded  to  in 
Vergil,  /En.  viii.  562,  and  Caesar,  B.G.  vi.  17,  tells  us  a 
similar  thing  of  the  Gauls.  The  Mexican  custom  of  sacri- 
ficing all  prisoners  of  war  to  the  god  of  war  was  of  the 
same  kind.  But  the  most  complete  example  of  the  ban 
in  the  Hebrew  sense,  occurring  among  a  foreign  people, 
is  to  be  found  in  the  Moabite  stone  which  Mesha,  king  of 
Moab,  erected  in  the  ninth  century  b.c,  i.e.  in  the  days 
of  Ahab.  Of  course  Moab  and  Israel  were  related  peoples, 
and  it  might  in  itself  be  possible  that  Moab  during  its 
subjection  to  Israel  had  adopted  the  ban  from  Israel. 
But  that  is  highly  improbable,  considering  how  wide- 
spread this  custom  is,  and  how  deeply  its  roots  are  fixed 
in  human  nature.  Rather  we  should  take  the  Moabite 
ban  as  an  example  of  its  usual  form  among  the  Semitic 
peoples.  "  And  Chemosh  said  to  me,  Go,  take  Nebo 
against  Israel.  And  I  went  by  night  and  fought  against  it 
from  the  break  of  morn  until  noon,  and  took  it  and  killed 


I70  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

them  all,  seven  thousand  men  and  boys,  and  women  and 
girls  and  maid-servants,  for  I  had  devoted  it  to  ^  Ashtor- 
Chemosh ' ;  and  I  took  thence  the  vessels  "  (so  Renan)  *'  of 
Yahweh,  and  I  dragged  them  before  Chemosh."^  The 
ordinary  Semitic  word  for  the  ban  is  Cherem.  It  denotes 
a  thing  separated  from  or  prohibited  to  common  use,  and 
no  doubt  it  indicated  originally  merely  that  which  was 
given  over  to  the  gods,  separated  for  their  exclusive  use 
for  ever.  In  this  way  it  was  distinguished  from  that 
which  was  ^^  sanctified "  to  Yahweh,  for  that  could  be 
redeemed  ;  devoted  things  could  not. 

In  the  ancient  laws  repeated  in  Lev.  xxvii.  28,  29, 
two  classes  of  devoted  things  seem  to  be  referred  to. 
First  of  all,  we  have  the  things  which  an  individual  ma}'- 
devote  to  God,  "  whether  of  man  or  beast,  or  of  the  field 
of  his  possession."  The  provision  made  in  regard  to 
them  is  that  they  shall  not  be  sold  or  redeemed,  but 
shall  become  in  the  highest  degree  sacred  to  Yahweh. 
Men  so  devoted,  therefore,  became  perpetual  slaves  at 
the  holy  places,  and  other  kinds  of  property  fell  to  the 
priests.  In  the  next  verse,  29,  we  read,  "  None  devoted 
which  shall  be  devoted  of"  {i.e.  from  among)  "men  shall 
be  ransomed ;  he  shall  surely  be  put  to  death,"  but  that 
must  refer  to  some  other  class  of  men  devoted  to  Yahweh. 
It  is  inconceivable  that  in  Israel  individuals  could  at  their 
own  will  devote  slaves  or  children  to  death.  Moreover, 
if  every  man  devoted  must  be  killed,  the  provision  of 
Numb,  xviii.  14,  according  to  which  everything  devoted  in 
Israel  is  to  be  Aaron's,  could  not  be  carried  out.  Further, 
there  is  a  difference  in  expression  in  the  two  verses :  in 
28  we  have  things  "devoted  to  Yahweh,"  in  29  we  have 
simply  men  "devoted."^     There  can  be  little  doubt,  there- 


•  Driver,  Notes  on  Hebrew  Text  of  the  Books  of  Samuel,  p.  loi,  note, 
^  Cf,  Dillmann,  Exodus  and  Leviticus^  p.  634. 


vii.]  THE  BAN  171 

fore,  that  we  have  in  ver.  29  the  case  of  men  condemned 
for  some  act  for  which  the  punishment  prescribed  by  the 
law  was  the  ban  (as  in  Exod.  xxii.  19,  "  He  that  sacri- 
ficeth  unto  any  god  save  unto  Yahweh  only  shall  be  put 
to  the  ban  "),  or  which  some  legal  tribunal  considered 
worthy  of  that  punishment.  In  such  cases,  the  object  of 
the  ban  being  something  offensive,  something  which  called 
out  the  Divine  wrath  and  abhorrence,  this  "  devotion  "  to 
God  meant  utter  destruction.  Just  as  anathemay  a  thing 
set  up  in  a  temple  as  a  votive  offering,  became  anathi^may 
an  accursed  thing,  and  as  sacer^  originally  meaning  sacred, 
came  to  mean  devoted  to  destruction,  so  Chcran,  among 
the  Semites,  came  to  have  the  meaning  of  a  thing  devoted 
to  destruction  by  the  wrath  of  the  national  gods.  From 
ancient  days  it  had  been  in  use,  and  in  Israel  it  continued 
to  be  practised,  but  with  a  new  moral  and  religious  pur- 
pose which  antiquity  could  know  nothing  of  No  more 
conspicuous  instance  of  that  transformation  of  ancient 
customs  of  a  doubtful  or  even  evil  kind  by  the  spirit  of 
the  religion  of  Yahweh,  v.^hich  is  one  of  the  most  remark- 
able characteristics  of  the  history  of  Israel,  can  be  conceived 
than  this  use  of  the  ban  for  higher  ends. 

As  the  fundamental  idea  of  the  Cherem  was  the  devoting 
of  objects  to  a  god,  it  is  manifest  that  the  whole  inner 
significance  of  the  institution  would  vary  with  the  con- 
ception of  the  Deity.  Among  the  worshippers  of  cruel 
and  sanguinary  gods,  such  as  the  gods  of  the  heathen 
Semites  were,  the  ends  which  this  practice  was  used  to 
promote  would  naturally  be  cruel  and  sanguinary.  More- 
over, where  it  was  thought  that  the  gods  could  be  bought 
over  by  acceptable  sacrifices,  where  they  were  conceived 
of  as  non-moral  beings,  whose  reasons  for  favour  or  anger 
were  equally  capricious  and  unfathomable,  it  was  inevitable 
that  the  Cherem  should  be  mainly  used  to  bribe  these  gods 
to  favour  and  help  their  peoples.     Where  victory  seemed 


172  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

easy  and  within  the  power  of  the  nation,  the  spoil  and  the 
inhabitants  of  a  conquered  city  or  country  would  be  taken 
by  the  conquerors  for  their  own  use.  Where,  on  the 
other  hand,  victory  was  difficult  and  doubtful,  an  effort 
would  be  made  to  win  the  favour  of  the  god,  and  wring 
success  from  him  by  promising  him  all  the  spoil.  The 
slaughter  of  the  captives  would  be  considered  the  highest 
gratification  such  sanguinary  gods  could  receive,  while 
their  pride  would  be  held  to  be  gratified  by  the  utter 
destruction  of  the  seat  of  the  worship  of  other  gods. 
Obviously  it  was  in  this  way  that  the  Gauls  and  Germans 
worked  this  institution ;  and  the  probability  is  that  the 
heathen  Semites  would  view  the  whole  matter  from  an 
even  lower  standpoint.  But  to  true  worshippers  of  Yahweh 
such  thoughts  must  have  grown  abhorrent.  From  the 
moment  when  their  God  became  the  centre  and  the  norm 
of  moral  life  to  Israel,  acts  which  had  no  scope  but  the 
gratification  of  a  thirst  for  blood,  or  of  a  petty  jealous 
pride,  could  not  be  thought  acceptable  to  Him.  Every 
institution  and  custom,  therefore,  which  had  no  moral 
element  in  it,  had  either  to  be  swept  away,  or  moralised 
in  the  spirit  of  the  purer  faith.  Now  the  ban  was  not 
abolished  in  Israel ;  but  it  was  morahsed,  and  turned  into 
a  potent  and  terrible  weapon  for  the  preservation  and 
advancement  of  true  religion. 

By  the  Divine  appointment  the  national  life  of  Israel 
was  bound  up  with  the  foundation  and  progress  of  true 
religion.  It  was  in  this  people  that  the  seeds  of  the 
highest  religion  were  to  be  planted,  and  it  was  by  means 
of  it  that  all  the  nations  of  the  earth  were  to  be  blessed. 
But  as  the  chief  means  to  this  end  was  to  be  the  higher 
ethical  and  religious  character  of  the  nation  as  such,  the 
preservation  of  that  from  depravation  and  decay  became 
the  main  anxiety  of  the  prophets  and  priests  and  law- 
givers of  Israel.     Just  as  in  modern  days  the  preservation 


vii.]  THE  BAN  173 

and  defence  of  the  State  is  reckoned  in  every  country  the 
supreme  law  which  overrides  every  other  consideration,  so 
in  Israel  the  preservation  of  the  higher  life  was  regarded. 
Rude  and  half-civilised  as  Israel  was  at  the  beginning  of 
its  career,  the  Divinely  revealed  religion  had  made  men 
conscious  of  that  which  gave  this  people  its  unique  value 
both  to  God  and  men.  They  recognised  that  its  glory 
and  strength  lay  in  its  thought  of  God,  and  in  the 
character  which  this  impressed  upon  the  corporate  life, 
as  well  as  on  the  life  of  each  individual.  As  we  have 
seen,  this  bred  in  them  a  consciousness  of  a  higher  calling, 
of  a  higher  obligation  resting  on  them  than  upon  others. 
They  consequently  felt  the  necessity  of  guarding  their 
special  character,  and  used  the  ban  as  their  great  weapon 
to  ward  off  the  contagion  of  evil,  and  to  give  this  character 
room  to  develop  itself  Its  tremendous,  even  cruel, 
power  was  directed  in  Israel  to  this  end ;  it  was  from  this 
point  of  view  alone  that  it  had  value  in  the  eyes  of  the 
fully  enlightened  man  of  Israel.  Stade  in  his  history 
(vol.  i.,  p.  490)  holds  that  this  distinction  did  not  exist,  that 
the  Israelite  view  differed  in  little,  if  anything,  from  that  of 
their  heathen  kinsmen,  and  that  the  ban  resulted  from  a 
vow  intended  to  gratify  Yahweh  and  win  His  favour  by 
giving  Him  the  booty.  But  it  is  undeniable  that  in  the 
earliest  statement  in  regard  to  it  (Exod.  xx.)  there  is  a 
distinct  legislative  provision  that  the  ban  should  be 
proclaimed  and  executed  irrespective  of  any  vow;  and 
in  the  later,  but  still  early,  notices  of  it  in  Joshua,  Judges, 
and  I  Samuel  the  command  to  execute  it  comes  in  every 
case  from  Yahweh.  In  Deuteronomy,  again,  the  ethical 
purpose  of  the  ban  is  always  insisted  upon,  most  emphat- 
ically perhaps  in  chap.  xx.  17  ff.,  where  the  Cherem  is  laid 
down  as  a  regular  practice  in  war  against  the  heathen 
inhabitants  of  Canaan  :  **  But  thou  shalt  utterly  destroy 
them,  .  .  .  that  they  teach  you  not  to  do  after  all  their 


174  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

abominations,  which  they  have  done  unto  their  gods ;  so 
should  ye  sin  against  Yahweh  your  God."  Whatever  hints 
or  appearances  there  may  be  in  the  Scripture  narratives 
that  the  lower  view  still  clung  to  some  minds  are  not  to 
be  taken  as  indicating  the  normal  and  re«ognised  view. 
They  were,  like  much  else  of  a  similar  kind,  mere  survivals, 
becoming  more  and  more  shadowy  as  the  history  advances, 
and  at  last  entirely  vanishing  away.  The  new  and  higher 
thought  which  Moses  planted  was  the  rising  and  pre- 
vailing element  in  the  Israelite  consciousness.  The  lower 
thought  was  a  decaying  reminiscence  of  the  state  of  things 
which  the  Mosaic  revelation  had  wounded  to  the  death, 
but  which  was  slow  in  dying. 

In  Israel,  therefore,  the  ban  was,  on  the  principles  of 
the  higher  religion,  legitimate  only  where  the  object 
was  to  preserve  that  religion  when  gravely  endangered. 
If  any  object  could  justify  a  measure  so  cruel  and 
sweeping  as  the  ban,  this  could,  and  this  is  the  only 
ground  upon  which  the  Scriptures  defend  it.  That  the 
danger  was  grave  and  imminent,  when  Israel  entered 
Canaan,  cannot  be  doubted.  As  we  have  seen,  the 
Israelite  tribes  were  far  from  being  of  one  blood  or  of 
one  faith.  There  was  a  huge  mixed  multitude  along 
with  them  ;  and  even  among  those  who  had  unquestioned 
title  to  be  reckoned  among  Israelites,  many  were  gross, 
carnal,  and  slavish  in  their  conceptions  of  things.  They 
had  not  learned  thoroughly  nor  assimilated  the  lessons 
they  had  been  taught.  Only  the  elect  among  them  had 
done  that;  and  the  danger  from  contact  with  races, 
superior  in  culture,  and  religiously  not  so  far  below 
the  position  occupied  by  the  multitude  of  Israel,  was 
extreme.  The  nation  was  born  in  a  day,  but  it  had  been 
educated  only  for  a  generation  ;  it  was  raw  and  ignorant 
in  all  that  concerned  the  Yahwistic  faith.  In  fact  it  was 
precisely  in  the  condition  in  which  spiritual  disease  could 


vii.]  THE  BAN  175 

be  most  easily  contracted  and  would  be  most  deadly. 
The  new  religion  had  not  been  securely  organised  ;  the 
customs  and  habits  of  the  people  still  needed  to  be  moulded 
by  it,  and  could  not,  consequently,  act  as  the  stay  and 
support  of  religion  as  they  did  at  later  times.  Further, 
the  people  were  at  the  critical  moment  when  they  were 
passing  from  one  stage  of  social  life  to  another.  At  such 
mom'ents  there  is  immense  danger  to  the  health  and 
character  of  a  nation,  for  there  is  no  unity  of  ideal  present 
to  every  mind.  That  which  they  are  moving  away  from 
has  not  ceased  to  exert  its  influence,  and  that  to  which 
they  are  moving  has  not  asserted  itself  with  all  its  power. 
At  such  crises  in  the  career  of  peoples  emerging  from 
barbarism,  even  physical  disease  is  apt  to  be  deadlier  and 
more  prevalent  than  it  is  among  either  civilised  or 
entirely  savage  men.  The  old  Semitic  heathenism  had 
not  been  entirely  overcome,  and  the  new  and  higher 
religion  had  not  succeeded  in  establishing  full  dominion. 
Contact  with  the  Canaanites  in  almost  any  shape  would 
under  such  circumstances  be  like  the  introduction  of  a 
contagious  disease,  and  at  almost  any  price  it  had  to  be 
avoided.  The  customs  of  the  world  at  that  time,  and  of 
the  Semitic  nations  in  particular,  offered  this  terribly 
effective  weapon  of  the  "  ban,"  and  for  this  higher  pur- 
pose it  was  accepted  ;  and  it  was  enforced  with  a  stringency 
which  nothing  would  justify  short  of  the  fact  that  life  or 
death  to  the  great  hope  of  mankind  was  involved  in  it. 

But  it  may  be  and  should  be  asked,  Would  any  circum- 
stances justify  Christian  men,  or  a  Christian  nation,  in 
entering  upon  a  war  of  extermination  now  ?  and  if  not, 
how  can  a  war  of  extermination  against  the  Canaanities 
have  been  sanctioned  by  God  ?  In  answer  to  the  first 
question,  it  must  be  said  that,  while  circumstances  can 
be  conceived  under  which  the  extermination  of  a  race 
would  certainly  be  carried  out  by  nations  called  Christian^ 


176  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

it  is  hardly  possible  to  imagine  Christian  men  taking  part 
in  such  a  massacre.  Even  the  supposed  command  of 
God  could  not  induce  them  to  do  so.-^  It  would  be  so 
contrary  to  all  that  they  have  learned  of  God's  will,  both 
as  regards  themselves  and  others,  that  they  would 
hesitate.  Almost  certainly  they  would  decide  that  they 
were  bound  to  be  faithful  to  what  God  had  revealed  of 
Himself;  they  would  feel  that  He  could  not  wish  to  blunt 
their  moral  sense  and  undo  what  He  had  done  for  them, 
and  they  would  put  aside  the  command  as  a  tempta- 
tion. But  the  case  with  the  Israelites  was  altogether 
different.  The  question  is  not,  how  could  God  destroy 
a  whole  people  ?  Were  it  only  that,  there  would  be  little 
difficulty.  Everywhere  in  His  action  through  nature 
God  is  ruthless  enough  against  sin.  Vice  and  sin  are 
every  day  bringing  men  and  women  and  innocent  children 
to  death,  and  to  suffering  worse  than  death.  For  that 
very  believer  in  God  holds  the  Divine  law  responsible. 
And  when  the  Divine  command  was  laid  upon  the  Israel- 
ites to  do,  more  speedily,  and  in  a  more  awe-inspiring  way, 
what  Canaanite  vices  were  already  doing,  there  can  be  no 
difficulty  except  in  so  far  as  the  effect  upon  the  Israelites 
is  concerned.  It  is  by  death,  inflicted  as  the  punishment 
of  vice,  and  sparing  neither  woman  nor  child,  that  nations 
have,  as  a  rule,  been  blotted  out ;  and,  except  to  the 
confused  thinker,  so  far  as  the  Divine  action  is  concerned 
there  is  no  difference  between  such  cases  and  this  of  the 
Canaanites.  The  real  question  is.  Can  a  living,  personal 
God  deliberately  set  to  men  a  task  which  can  only  lower 
them  in  the  scale  of  humanity — brutalise  them,  in  fact  ? 
No,  is  of  course  the  only  possible  answer ;  therefore  a 
supposed  Divine  command  coming  to  us  to  do  such 
things  would  rightly  be  suspected.      We   could  not,  we 

*  Mozley's  Lectures  on  the  Old  Testament,  p.  102. 


vil.]  THE  BAN  177 

feel  sure,  be  called  upon  by  God  to  slay  the  innocent 
with  the  guilty,  to  overwhelm  in  one  common  punish- 
ment individual  beings  who  have  each  of  them  an  inalien- 
able claim  to  justice  at  our  hands.  But  the  Israelites  had 
not  and  could  not  have  the  feeling  we  have  on  the  subject. 
The  feeling  for  the  individual  did  not  exist  in  early 
times.  The  clan,  the  tribe,  the  nation  was  everything, 
and  the  individual  nothing.  Consequently  there  was 
not  existent  in  the  world  that  keen  feeling  in  regard 
to  individual  rights,  which  dominates  us  so  completely  that 
we  can  with  difficulty  conceive  any  other  view.  In  this 
world  the  early  Israelite  scarcely  perceived  the  individual 
man,  and  beyond  this  world  he  knew  of  no  certain  career 
for  him.  He  consequently  dealt  with  him  only  as  part  of 
his  clan  or  tribe.  His  tribe  suffered  for  him  and  he  for 
his  tribe,  and  in  early  penal  law  the  two  could  hardly  be 
separated.  Indeed  it  may  almost  be  said  that,  when  the 
individual  suffered  for  his  own  sin,  the  satisfaction  felt  by 
the  wronged  was  rather  due  to  the  tribe  having  suffered 
so  much  loss  in  the  individual's  death  than  to  the  retri- 
bution which  fell  upon  him.  Moreover  war  was  the 
constant  employment  of  all,  and  death  by  violence  the 
most  common  of  all  forms  of  death.  Manners  and  feelings 
were  both  rude,  and  the  pains  as  well  as  the  pleasures  of 
civilised  and  Christian  men  lay  largely  beyond  their 
horizon.  There  was  consequently  no  danger  of  doing 
violence  to  nobler  feelings  or  of  leaving  a  sting  in  the  con- 
science by  calling  such  men  to  such  work.  The  stage  of 
moral  development  they  had  reached  did  not  forbid  it,  and 
the  work  therefore  might  be  given  them  of  God. 

But  the  grounds  for  the  action  were  immeasurably  raised. 
Instead  of  being  left  on  the  heathen  level,  "  the  usage  was 
utilised  so  as  to  harmonise  with  the  principles  of  their 
religion,  and  to  satisfy  its  needs.  It  became  a  mode  of 
secluding  and  rendering  harmless  anything  which   pecu- 

12 


178  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

liarly  imperilled  the  religious  life  of  either  an  individual 
or  the  community,  such  objects  being  withdrawn  from 
society  at  large,  and  presented  to  the  sanctuary,  which  had 
power,  if  needful,  to  authorise  their  destruction."  ^  The 
Deuteronomic  command  is  not  given  shamefacedly.  The 
interests  at  stake  are  too  great  for  that.  Israel  is  utterly 
to  smite  the  Canaanite  nations,  to  put  them  to  the  ban,  to 
make  no  covenant  with  them  nor  to  intermarry  with  them. 
^'  Thus  shall  ye  deal  v/ith  them  :  ye  shall  break  down  their 
altars,  and  dash  in  pieces  their  obelisks,  and  hew  down 
their  Asherim,  and  burn  their  graven  images  with  fire." 
There  is  a  fierce,  curt  energy  about  the  words  v^hich 
impresses  the  reader  with  the  vigour  needed  to  defend  the 
true  religion.  The  danger  was  seen  to  be  great,  and  this 
tremendous  weapon  of  the  ban  was  to  be  wielded  with 
unsparing  rigour,  if  Israel  was  to  be  true  to  its  highest 
call.  "  For,"  ver.  6  goes  on  to  say,  "  thou  art  a  holy 
people  unto  Yahweh  thy  God  ;  Yahweh  thy  God  hath 
chosen  thee  to  be  a  peculiar  people  unto  Himself,  out  of 
all  peoples  that  are  upon  the  face  of  the  earth."  They 
were  the  elect  of  God  ;  they  were  a  holy  people,  a  people 
separated  unto  their  God,  and  the  Divine  blessing  was  to 
come  upon  all  nations  through  them  if  they  remained  true. 
Their  separateness  must  therefore  be  maintained.  As  a 
people  marked  out  by  the  love  of  God,  they  could  nQt  share 
in  the  common  life  of  the  world  as  it  then  was.  They 
could  not  lift  the  Canaanites  to  their  level  by  mingling 
with  them.  So  they  would  only  obscure,  nay,  in  so 
far  as  this  rigorous  command  was  not  carried  out, 
they  did  all  but  fatally  obscure,  the  higher  elements 
of  national  and  personal  life  which  they  had  received. 
They  were  too  recently  converted  to  be  the  people  of 
Yahweh,   too  weak  in  their  own  faith,  to  be  able  to  do 


'  Driver,  Notes  on  the  Hebrew  Text  of  the  Books  of  SarAuel,  p.  iQi, 


vii.]  THE  BAN  179 

anything  but  stand  in  this  austere  and  repellent  attitude 
towards  the  world.  Centuries  passed  before  they  could 
relax  without  danger.  It  may  even  be  said  that  until  the 
coming  of  our  Lord  they  dared  not  take  up  any  other  than 
this  separatist  position,  though  as  the  ages  passed  and  the 
prophetic  influence  grew,  the  yearning  after  a  gathering  in 
of  the  Gentiles,  and  the  promise  of  it  in  the  Messianic 
day,  became  more  markedly  prominent.  Only  when  men 
could  look  forward  to  being  made  perfect  in  Jesus  Christ 
did  they  receive  the  command  to  go  unreservedly  out  into 
the  world,  for  only  then  had  they  an  anchor  which  no 
storm  in  the  world  could  drag. 

But  we  must  be  careful  not  to  exaggerate  the  separation 
called  for  here.  It  does  not  authorise  anything  like  the 
fierce,  intolerant  thirst  for  conquest  and  domination  which 
was  the  very  keynote  of  Islam.  ^  In  Deut.  ii.  5,  6,  19,  the 
lands  of  Edom,  Moab,  and  Ammon  are  said  to  be  Yahweh's 
gift  to  these  peoples  in  the  same  way  as  Canaan  was  to  Israel. 
Nor  did  the  law  ever  authorise  the  bitter  and  contemp- 
tuous feeling  with  which  Pharisaic  Israelites  often  regarded 
all  men  beyond  the  pale  of  Judaism.  There  was  no  general 
prohibition  against  friendly  intercourse  with  other  peoples. 
It  was  against  those  only,  whose  presence  in  Canaan  would 
have  frustrated  the  establishment  of  the  theocracy,  and 
whose  influence  would  have  been  destructive  of  it  when 
established,  that  the  "  ban  "  was  decreed.  When  war  arose 
between  Israel  and  cities  farther  off  than  those  of  Canaan, 
they  were  not  to  be  put  to  the  "  ban."  Though  they  were 
to  be  hardly  treated  according  to  our  ideas,  they  were  to 
suffer  only  the  fate  of  cities  stormed  in  those  days,  for 
the  danger  of  corruption  w^as  proportioiiately  diminished 
(Deut.  XX.  17)  by  their  distance.  The  right  of  other  peoples 
to  their  lands  was  to   be  respected,   and    friendly  inter- 

'  Riehm,  Old  Testament  Theology^  p.  98. 


i8o  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


course  might  be  entered  on  with  them.  But  the  right  of 
Israel  to  the  free  and  unhindered  development  to  which  it 
had  been  called  by  Yahweh  was  the  supreme  law.  The 
suspicion  of  danger  to  that  was  to  make  things  otherwise 
harmless,  or  even  useful,  to  be  abhorred.  If  men  are  to 
live  nearer  to  God  than  others,  they  must  sacrifice  much 
to  the  higher  call. 

To  press  home  this,  to^duce  Israel  to  respond  to  this 
demand,  to  convince  them  anew  of  their  obligation  to  go 
any  length  to  keep  their  position  as  a  people  holy  to 
Yahweh,  our  chapter  urges  a  variety  of  reasons.  The 
first  (vv.  7-1 1)  is  that  the  history  and  grounds  of  their 
election  exhibit  the  character  of  Yahweh  in  such  a  way 
as  to  heighten  their  sense  of  their  privileges  and  the 
danger  of  losing  them.  He  had  chosen  them,  only 
because  of  His  own  love  to  them  ;  and  having  chosen 
them  and  sworn  to  their  fathers,  He  is  true  to  His 
covenant.  He  brought  them  out  of  the  house  of  bond- 
age, and  has  led  them  until  now.  In  Yahweh  they  had 
a  spiritual  ideal,  whose  characteristics  were  love  and  faith- 
fulness. But  though  He  loves  He  can  be  wrathful,  and 
though  He  has  made  a  covenant  with  Israel,  it  must  be 
fulfilled  in  accordance  with  righteousness.  In  dealing 
with  such  a  God  they  must  beware  of  thinking  that  their 
election  is  irrespective  of  moral  conditions,  or  that  His  love 
is  mere  good  nature.  He  can  and  does  smite  the  enemies 
of  good,  for  anger  is  always  possible  where  love  is.  It  is 
only  with  good  nature  that  anger  is  not  compatible,  just  as 
warm  and  self-sacrificing  affection  also  is.  Those  who 
turn  away  from  Him,  therefore,  He  requites  immediately 
to  their  face,  as  surely  as  "  He  keepeth  covenant  and 
mercy  with  them  that  love  Him  and  keep  His  command- 
ments." All  the  blessed  and  intimate  relations  which  He 
has  opened  up  with  them,  and  in  which  their  safety  and 
their  glory  lie,  can  be  dissolved  by  sin.     They  are,  there- 


vii.]  THE  BAN  i8i 

fore,  to  strike  fiercely  at  temptation,  to  regard  neither 
their  own  lives  nor  the  lives  of  others  when,  that  has  to  be 
put  out  of  the  way,  to  smite  and  spare  not,  for  the  very 
love  of  God. 

A  second  reason  why  they  should  obey  the  Divine 
commands,  as  in  other  matters,  so  in  this  terrible  thing,  is 
this.  If  they  be  willing  and  obedient,  then  God  will  bless 
them  in  temporal  ways  as  well  as  with  spiritual  blessings. 
Even  for  their  earthly  prosperity  a  loyal  attitude  to 
Yahweh  would  prove  decisive.  "  Thou  shalt  be  blessed 
above  all  peoples  ;  there  shall  not  be  a  male  or  female 
barren  among  you,  or  among  your  cattle.  And  Yahweh 
will  take  away  from  thee  all  sickness,  and  He  will  put 
none  of  the  evil  diseases  of  Egypt  which  thou  knowest 
upon  thee  ;  but  will  lay  them  upon  all  them  that  hate 
thee."  The  same  promises  are  renewed  in  more  detail 
and  with  greater  emphasis  in  the  speech  contained  in 
chapters  xxviii.  and  xxix.  There  the  significance  of  such 
a  view,  and  the  difficulties  involved  in  it  for  us,  will  be 
fully  discussed.  Here  it  will  be  sufficient  to  note  that 
the  profit  of  obedience  is  brought  in  to  induce  Israel  to 
enforce  the  ''  ban  "  most  rigorously. 

The  last  verses  of  our  chapter,  vv.  17-26,  set  before 
Israel  a  third  incitement  and  encouragement.  Yahweh,  ^X) 
who  had  proved  His  might  and  His  favour  for  them  by 
His  mighty  deeds  in  Egypt,  would  be  among  them,  to 
make  them  stronger  than  their  mightiest  foes  (ver.  21): 
*'  Thou  shalt  not  be  affi-ighted  at  them,  for  Yahweh  thy 
God  is  in  the  midst  of  thee,  a  great  God  and  a  terrible." 
The  previous  inducements  to  obey  Yahw^eh  their  God  and 
be  true  to  Him  were  founded  on  His  character  and  on 
His  acts.  He  was  merciful ;  but  He  could  be  terrible, 
and  He  would  reward  the  faithful  with  prosperity.  Now 
His  people  are  encouraged  to  go  forward  because  His 
presence   will   go   with    them.     In    the    conflicts    which 


i82  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

obedience  to  Him  would  provoke,  He  would  be  with  them 
to  sustain  them,  whatever  stress  might  come  upon  them. 
Step  by  step  they  would  drive  out  those  very  peoples 
whom  they  had  dreaded  so  when  the  spies  brought  back 
their  report  of  the  land.  The  terror  of  their  God  would 
fall  upon  all  these  nations.  A  great  God  and  a  terrible 
He  would  prove  Himself  to  be,  and  with  Him  in  their 
midst  they  might  go  forth  boldly  to  execute  the  ban  upon 
the  Canaanites.  The  sins  and  vices  of  these  peoples  had 
brought  this  upon  them ;  their  horrible  worship  left  an 
indelible  stain  wherever  its  shadow  fell.  Israel,  led  and 
directed  by  Yahweh  Himself,  was  to  fall  upon  them  as 
the  scourge  of  God. 

Nothwithstanding  the  Divine  urgency,  the  command  to 
destroy  the  Ganaanites  and  their  idols  was  not  carried 
out.  After  a  victory  or  two  the  enemy  began  to  submit. 
Glad  to  be  rid  of  the  toils  of  war,  Israel  settled  down 
among  the  people  of  the  land.  All  central  control  would 
seem  to  have  disappeared.  The  Canaanite  worship  and 
the  Canaanite  customs  attracted  and  fascinated  the  people, 
and  enemy  after  enemy  broke  in  upon  them  and  triumphed 
over  them.  The  half-idolatrous  masses  were  led  away 
into  depraved  forms  of  worship,  and  for  a  time  it  looked 
as  if  the  work  of  Moses  would  be  utterly  undone.  Had 
the  purer  faith  he  taught  them  not  been  revived,  Israel 
would  probably  not  have  survived  the  period  of  the 
Judges.  As  it  VN^as,  they  just  survived  ;  but  by  their  lapse 
the  leavening  of  the  whole  of  the  nation  with  the  pure 
principles  of  Yahweh-worship  had  been  stopped.  Instead 
of  being  cured,  the  idolatrous  inclinations  they  had 
brought  with  them  from  the  pre-Mosaic  time  had  been 
revived  and  strengthened.  Multitudes,  while  caUing 
Yahweh  their  God,  had  sunk  almost  to  the  Canaanite 
level  in  their  worship,  and  during  the  whole  period  of 
their  existence  as  a  nation  Israel  as  a  whole  never  again 


vii.]  THE  BAN  183 

rose  clear  of  half-heathen  conceptions  of  their  God.  The 
prophets  taught  and  threatened  them  in  vain,  until  at  last 
ruin  fell  upon  them  and  the  Divine  threats  of  punishment 
were  fulfilled. 


CHAPTER   X 

THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE 

IN  our  modern  time  this  practice  of  the  ban  has,  of 
course,  become  antiquated  and  impossible.  The 
Cher  em  ^  or  ban,  of  the  modern  synagogue  is  a  different 
thing,  based  upon  different  motives,  and  is  directed  to 
the  same  ends  as  Christian  excommunication.  But  though 
the  thing  has  ceased,  the  principles  underlying  it,  and  the 
view  of  life  which  it  implies,  are  of  perpetual  validity. 
These  belong  to  the  essential  truths  of  religion,  and 
especially  need  to  be  recalled  in  a  time  like  ours,  when 
men  tend  everywhere  to  a  feeble,  lax,  and  cosmopolitan 
view  of  Christianity.  As  we  have  seen,  the  fundamental 
principle  of  the  Cherem  was  that,  however  precious, 
however  sacred,  however  useful  and  helpful  in  ordinary 
circumstances  a  thing  might  be,  whenever  it  became 
dangerous  to  the  higher  life  it  should  at  once  be  given 
up  to  Yahweh.  The  lives  of  human  beings,  even  though 
they  were  men's  dearest  and  nearest,  should  be  sacrificed ; 
the  richest  works  of  art,  the  weapons  of  war,  and  the 
wealth  which  would  have  adorned  life  and  made  it  easy, 
were  equally  to  be  given  up  to  Him,  that  He  might  seclude 
them  and  render  them  harmless  to  men's  highest  interests. 
Neighbourliness  to  the  Canaanites  was  absolutely  forbidden, 
and  the  Church  of  the  Old  Testament  was  commanded 
to  take  up  a  position  of  hostility,  or  at  best  of  armed 
neutrality,  to  all  the  pleasures,  interests,  and  concerns  of 
the  peoples  who  surrounded  them.     Now  the  prevailing 

184 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  185 


modern  view  is  that  not  only  the  ban  itself,  but  these 
principles  have  become  obsolete.  Notv^ithstanding  that 
the  Church  of  the  New  Testament  is  the  bearer  of  the 
higher  interests  of  humanity,  we  are  taught  that  when 
it  is  least  definite  in  its  direction  as  to  conduct,  when  it 
is  most  tolerant  of  the  practices  of  the  world,  then  it  is 
most  true  to  its  original  conception.  We  are  told  that 
an  indulgent  Church  is  what  is  wanted;  rigour  and 
religion  are  now  supposed  to  be  finally  divorced  in  all 
enlightened  minds.  This  view  is  not  often  categorically 
expressed,  but  it  underlies  all  fashionable  religion,  and 
has  its  apostles  in  the  golden  youth  who  forward  enlighten- 
ment by  playing  tennis  on  Sundays.  Because  of  it  too, 
Puritan  has  become  a  name  of  scorn,  and  careless  self- 
gratification  a  mark  of  cultured  Christianity.  Not  only 
asceticism,  but  aaKijac^;  has  been  discredited,  and  the  moral 
tone  of  society  has  perceptibly  fallen  in  consequence.  In 
wide  circles  both  within  and  without  the  Church  it  seems 
to  be  held  that  pain  is  the  only  intolerable  evil,  and  in 
legislation  as  well  as  in  literature  that  idea  has  been 
registering  itself. 

For  much  of  this  progress,  as  some  call  it,  no  reasoned 
justification  has  been  attempted,  but  it  has  been  defended 
in  part  by  the  allegation  that  the  circumstances  which 
make  the  *'  ban  "  necessary  to  the  very  life  of  the  ancient 
people  of  God  have  passed  away,  now  that  social  and 
political  life  has  been  Christianised.  Even  those  who 
are  outside  the  Church  in  Christian  lands  are  no  longer 
living  at  a  moral  and  spiritual  level  so  much  below  that 
of  the  Church.  They  are  not  heathen  idolaters,  whose 
moral  and  religious  ideas  are  contagiously  corrupting, 
and  nothing  but  Pharisaism  of  the  worst  type,  it  is  said, 
can  justify  the  Church  in  taking  up  a  position  to  society 
in  any  degree  like  that  which  was  imposed  upon  ancient 
Israel.     Now  it  cannot  be  denied  that  there  is  truth  here, 


i86  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

and  in  so  far  as  the  Christian  Church  or  individual  Chris- 
tians have  taken  up  precisely  the  same  position  to  those 
v^^ithout  as   is  implied  in  the   Old  Testament  ban^  they 
are  not  to  be  defended.     Modern  society,  as   at  present 
constituted,   is  not  corrupting  like  that  of  Canaan.     No 
one  in  a  modern  Christian  state  has  been  brought  up  in 
an   atmosphere   of  heathenism,    and   what  an  incredible 
difference  that  involves  only  those  who  know  heathenism 
well  can  appreciate.     If  spiritual  life  is  neither  understood 
nor  believed  in   by  all,  yet  the  rules  of  morals  are  the 
same  in  every  mind,  and  these  rules  are  the  product  of 
Christianit3\       As    a   consequence,    the    Church    is    not 
endangered  in  the  same  way  and  to  the  same  degree  by 
contact  with  the  world  as  in  the  ancient  days.     Indeed 
to  the  Israelite   of   the    post-Mosaic  time    our    "  v^^orld," 
which  some  sects  at  least  would  absolutely  ignore  and 
shut   out,    would   seem    a    very   definite   and    legitimate 
part  of  the   Church.     The  Jewish  Church  was  certainly 
to  a  very  large  extent  made  up  of  precisely  such  elements, 
while  those  who  were  to  be  put  to  the  ban  v/ere  far  more 
remote   than   any  citizens  of  a   modern    state,    except   a 
portion  of  the  criminal  class.     Further,  those  not  actively 
Christian  are,  on    account   of  this  community   of  moral 
sentiments,  open  to  appeal  from  the  Church  as  the  heathen 
Canaanites  were  not.     In  English-speaking  lands,   while 
there    are    multitudes    indifferent     to    Christianity,    most 
acknowledge  the  obligation  of  the  Christian  motives.     In 
nations    at    least    nominally    Christian,    therefore,    both 
because   the   danger   of  corruption   is   greatly   less,  and 
because  the  world  is   more  accessible    to  the   leaven   of 
Christian  life,  no  Church  can,  or  dare,  without  incurring 
terrible  loss  and  responsibility,  withdraw  from   or   show 
a  merely  hostile  front  to  the  world.     The  sects  which  do 
so  live  an  invalid  life.     Their  virtues  take  on  the  sickly 
look  of  all  '' fugitive  and  cloistered  virtue."  Their  doctrines 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  187 

become  full  of  the  ^*  idols  of  the  cave,"  and  they  cease  to 
have  any  perception  of  the  real  needs  of  men. 

Nevertheless  the  austere  spirit  inculcated  in  this  chapter 
must  be  kept  alive,  if  the  Church  is  to  be  the  spiritual 
leader  of  humanity,  for  strenuousness  is  the  great  want 
of  modern  life.  Dr.  Pearson,  whose  book  on  National 
Life  and  Character  has  lately  expounded  the  theory  that 
the  Church,  ''  being  too  inexorable  in  its  ideal  to  admit 
of  compromises  with  human  frailty,  is  precisely  on  this 
account  unfitted  for  governing  fallible  men  and  women," 
i.e.  governing  them  in  the  political  sense,  has  elsewhere 
stated  his  view  of  the  remedy  for  one  of  the  great  evils 
of  modern  life.^  **  The  disproportionate  growth  of  the 
distributing  classes,  as  compared  with  the  producing,  is 
due,  I  believe,  to  two  moral  causes — the  love  of  amuse- 
ment and  the  passion  for  speculation.  Men  flock  out  of 
healthy  country  lives  in  farms  or  mines  into  our  great 
cities,  because  they  like  to  be  near  the  theatre  and  the 
racecourse,  or  because  they  hope  to  grow  rich  suddenly 
by  some  form  of  gambling.  The  cure  for  a  taint  of  this 
kind  is  not  economical  but  religious,  and  can  only  be 
found,  I  am  convinced,  in  a  return  to  the  masculine 
asceticism  that  has  distinguished  the  best  days  of  history, 
Puritan  or  Republican."  This  is  emphatically  true  of 
Australia,  where  and  of  which  the  words  were  first 
spoken  ;  and  masculine  asceticism  of  the  Puritan  t3^pe 
would  cure  many  another  evil  there  besides  these.  But 
the  same  thing  is  true  everywhere  ;  and  if  religion  is  to 
cure  slackness  in  social  or  political  life,  how  much  more 
must  it  cultivate  this  austere  spirit  for  itself  I  The  func- 
tion of  the  Church  is  not  to  govern  the  world ;  it  seeks 
rather  to  inspire  the  world.  It  should  lead  the  advance 
to  a  higher,  more  ennobling  life,  and  should  exhibit  that 

*  The  Social  Movements  of  the  Age,  by  Professor  Pearson,  Melbourne 
Church  Congress,  1882. 


1 88  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

in  its  own  collective  action  and  in  the  kind  of  character 
it  produces.  Its  greatest  gift  to  the  world  should  be  itself, 
and  it  is  useful  only  when  it  is  true  to  its  own  ethos  and 
spirit.  To  keep  that  unimpaired  must  therefore  be  its 
first  duty,  and  to  fulfil  that  duty  it  must  keep  rigorously 
back  from  everything  which,  in  relation  to  its  own  existing 
state,  would  be  likely  to  lower  the  power  of  its  peculiar 
life.  The  State  must  often  compromise  with  human 
frailty.  Often  there  will  be  before  the  legislator  and 
the  statesman  only  a  choice  between  two  evils,  or  at  least 
two  undesirable  courses,  unless  a  worse  thing  is  to  be 
tolerated.  The  Church,  on  the  other  hand,  should  keep 
close  to  the  ideal  as  it  sees  it.  Its  reason  for  existence 
is  that  it  may  hold  up  the  ideal  to  men,  and  exhibit  it 
as  far  as  that  may  be.  Compromise  in  regard  to  that 
is  impossible  for  the  Church,  for  that  would  be  nothing 
else  than  disloyalty  to  its  own  essential  principle.  The 
spirit,  therefore,  that  inspired  the  "  ban  "  must  always  be 
living  and  powerful  in  the  Church.  Whatever  is  dangerous 
to  the  special  Christian  life  must  cease  to  exist  for  Chris- 
tians. It  should  be  laid  at  the  feet  of  their  Divine  Head, 
that  He  may  seclude  it  from  His  people  and  render  it 
innocuous.  Many  things  that  are  harmless  or  even  useful 
at  a  lower  level  of  life  must  be  refused  a  place  by  the 
Christian.  Gratifications  that  cannot  but  seem  good  to 
others  must  be  refused  by  him  ;  for  he  seeks  to  be  in  the 
forefront  of  the  battle  against  evil,  to  be  the  pioneer  to  a 
more  whole-hearted  spiritual  life. 

But  that  does  not  imply  that  we  should  seek  to  renew 
the  various  imperfect  and  external  devices  by  which  past 
times  sought  to  attain  this  exceedingly  desirable  end. 
Experience  has  taught  the  folly  and  futility  of  sumptuary 
laws,  for  example.  Their  only  effect  was  to  do  violence 
to  the  inwardness  which  belongs  of  necessity  to  spiritual 
life.      They    externalised    and    depraved    moralit}^,     and 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  189 

finally  defeated  themselves.  Nor  would  the  later  Puritan- 
ism, with  lits  rigidity  as  regards  dress  and  deportment, 
and  its  narrow  and  limited  view  of  life,  help  us  much 
more.  It  began  doubtless  with  the  right  principle  ;  but 
it  sought  to  bind  all  to  its  observances,  whether  they 
cared  for  the  spirit  of  them  or  not;  and  it  showed  a 
measureless  intemperance  in  regard  to  the  things  which 
it  declared  hostile  to  the  life  of  faith.  In  that  form  it  has 
been  charged  with  '^  isolation  from  human  histor}^,  human 
enjoyment,  and  all  the  manifold  play  and  variety  of 
human  character."  For  a  short  time,  however,  Puritanism 
did  strike  the  golden  mean  in  this  matter,  and  probably 
we  could  not  in  this  present  connection  find  a  better 
example  for  modern  days  than  in  the  Puritanism  of 
Spenser,  of  Colonel  Hutchinson  (one  of  the  regicides  so 
called),  and  of  Milton.  Their  united  lives  covered  the 
heroic  period  of  Puritanism,  and  taken  in  their  order  they 
represent  very  fairly  its  rise,  its  best  estate,  and  its 
tendencies  towards  harsh  extremes,  when  as  yet  it  was 
but  a  tendency. 

Spenser,  born  in  the  ''spacious  times  of  great  Eliza- 
beth," was  politically  and  nationally  a  Puritan,  and  in 
aim  and  ideal,  at  least,  was  so  in  his  stern  view  of  life  and 
religion.^  Kis  attachment  to  Lord  Grey  of  Wilton,  that 
personally  kind  yet  absolutely  ruthless  executor  of  the 
English  "  ban "  against  the  untamable  Irish,  and  his 
defence  of  his  policy,  show  the  one ;  while  his  Fai7y 
Queen,  with  its  representation  of  religion  as  "  the  founda- 
tion of  all  nobleness  in  man  "  and  its  dwelling  upon  man's 
victory  over  himself,  reveals  the  other.  But  he  had  in 
him  also  elements  belonging  to  that  strangely  mingled 
world  in  which  he  lived,  and  which  came  from  an  entirely 
different   source.      He  had    the   EHzabethan    enthusiasm 


•  Vide  Church's  Spenser,  p.  16. 


I90  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

for  beauty,  the  large  delight  in  life  as  such  even  where 
its  moral  quality  was  questionable,  and  the  artist's 
sensitiveness  and  adaptability  in  a  very  high  degree 
These  diverse  elements  were  never  fully  interfused  in 
him.  Amid  all  the  gracious  beauty  of  his  work,  there  is 
the  trace  of  discord  and  the  mark  of  conflict;  and  at 
times  perhaps  his  life  fell  into  courses  which  spoke  little 
of  self-control.  But  his  face  was  always  in  the  main 
turned  upwards.  In  the  main,  too,  his  life  corresponded 
with  his  aspirations.  He  combined  his  poetic  gift,  his 
love  of  men  and  human  life,  with  a  faithfulness  to  his 
ideal  of  conduct  which,  if  not  always  perfect,  was  sincere, 
and  was,  too,  as  we  may  hope,  ultimately  victorious. 
The  Puritan  in  him  had  not  entire  victory  over  the 
worldling,  but  it  had  the  mastery;  and  the  very  im- 
perfection of  the  victory  kept  the  character  in  sympathy 
with  the  whole  of  life. 

In  Colonel  Hutchinson,  ^  as  depicted  in  that  stately  and 
tender  panegyric  which  speaks  to  us  across  more  than 
two  centuries  so  pathetically  of  his  wife's  almost  adoring 
love,  we  see  the  Puritan  character  in  its  fullest  and  most 
balanced  form.  We  do  not,  of  course,  mean  that  his 
mind  had  the  imaginative  power  of  Spenser's,  or  his 
character  the  force  of  Milton's ;  but  partly  from  circum- 
stances, partly  by  singular  grace  of  nature,  his  character 
possessed  a  stability  and  an  equilibrium  which  had  not 
come  when  Spenser  lived,  and  which  was  beginning  to 
go  in  the  evil  days  upon  which  Milton  fell.  At  the 
root  of  all  his  virtues  his  wife  sets  "  that  which  was 
the  head  and  spring  of  them  all,  his  Christianity." 
"  By  Christianity,"  she  says,  "  I  intend  that  universal 
habit  of  grace  which  is  wrought  in  a  soul  by  the  re- 
generating Spirit  of  God,  whereby  the  whole  creature  is 

'  Memoirs  of  Colonel  Hutchinson,  by  his  wife. 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  191 

resigned  up  into  the  Divine  will  and  love,  and  all  its 
actions  designed  to  the  obedience  and  glory  of  its  Maker." 
He  had  been  trained  in  a  Puritan  home,  and  though 
when  he  went  out  into  the  world  he  had  to  face  quite 
the  average  temptations  of  a  rich  and  well-born  youth, 
he  fled  all  youthful  lusts.  But  he  did  not  retire  from  the 
world.  "  He  could  dance  admirably  well,  but  neither  in 
youth  nor  riper  years  made  any  practice  of  it ;  he  had 
skill  in  fencing  such  as  became  a  gentleman ;  he  had  a 
great  love  to  music,  and  often  diverted  himself  with  a  viol, 
on  which  he  played  masterly ;  he  had  an  exact  ear,  and 
judgment  in  other  music ;  he  shot  excellently  in  bows 
and  guns,  and  much  used  them  for  his  exercise ;  he  had 
great  judgment  in  painting,  graving,  sculpture,  and  all 
liberal  arts,  and  had  many  curiosities  of  value  in  all  kinds. 
He  took  much  pleasure  in  improvement  of  grounds,  in 
planting  groves  and  walks  and  fruit-trees,  in  opening 
springs  and  making  fishponds.  Of  country  recreations 
he  loved  none  but  hawking,  and  in  that  was  very  eager, 
and  much  delighted  for  the  time  he  used  it."  Hutchinson 
was  no  ascetic,  therefore,  in  the  wrong  sense,  but  lived  in 
and  enjoyed  the  world  as  a  man  should.  But  perhaps  his 
greatest  divergence  from  the  lower  Puritanism  lay  in 
this,  that  "  everything  that  it  was  necessary  for  him  to 
do  he  did  with  delight,  free  and  unconstrained."  More- 
over, though  he  adopted  strong  Puritan  opinions  in 
theology,  "  he  hated  persecution  for  religion,  and  was 
always  a  champion  for  all  religious  people  against  all 
their  great  oppressors.  Nevertheless  self-restraint  was 
the  law  of  his  life,  and  he  many  times  forbore  things 
lawful  and  delightful  to  him,  rather  than  he  would 
give  any  one  occasion  of  scandal."  In  public  affairs 
he  took  the  courageous  part  of  a  man  who  sought 
nothing  for  himself,  and  was  moved  only  by  his  hatred 
of  wrong  to  leave  the  prosperity  and  peace  of  his  home- 


192  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

life.  He  became  a  member  of  the  Court  which  tried 
the  King  against  his  will,  but  signed  the  warrant  for 
his  death,  simply  because  he  conceived  it  to  be  his 
duty.  When  the  Restoration  came  and  he  was  chal- 
lenged for  his  conduct,  scorning  the  subterfuges  of 
some  who  declared  they  signed  under  compulsion,  he 
quietly  accepted  the  responsibility  for  his  acts.  This 
led  to  his  death  in  the  flower  of  his  age,  through  im- 
prisonment in  the  Tower  ;  but  he  never  flinched,  "  having 
made  up  his  accounts  with  life  and  death,  and  fixed  his 
purpose  to  entertain  both  honourably."  From  the 
beginning  of  his  life  to  the  end  there  was  a  consistent 
sanity,  which  is  rare  at  any  time,  and  was  especially  rare 
in  those  days.  His  loyalty  to  God  kept  him  austerely 
aloof  from  unworthiness,  while  it  seemed  to  add  zest  to 
the  sinless  joys  which  came  in  his  way.  Above  all,  it 
never  suff'ered  him  to  forget  that  the  true  Christian 
temper  and  character  was  the  pearl  of  price  which  all 
else  he  had  might  lawfully  be  sacrificed  to  purchase. 

In  the  character  of  Milton  we  find  the  same  essential 
elements,  the  same  purity  in  youth,  which,  with  his 
beauty,  won  for  him  the  name  of  the  Lady  of  his  College ; 
the  same  courage  and  public  spirit  in  manhood ;  the  same 
love  of  music  and  of  culture.  After  his  University  career 
he  retired  to  his  father's  house,  and  read  all  Greek  and 
Latin  Hterature,  as  well  as  Italian,  and  studied  Hebrew 
and  some  other  Oriental  languages.  All  the  culture  of 
his  time,  therefore,  was  absorbed  by  him,  and  his  mind 
and  speech  were  shot  through  and  through  with  the 
brilliant  colours  of  the  history  and  romance  of  many 
climes.  Almost  no  kind  of  beauty  failed  to  appeal  to  him, 
but  the  austerity  of  his  views  of  life  kept  him  from  being 
enslaved  by  it.  In  his  earlier  works  even,  he  caught  in 
a  surprising  way  all  the  glow,  and  splendour,  and  poetic 
fervour  of  the  English  Renaissance ;  but  he  joined  with 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  193 

it  the  sternest  and  most  uncompromising  Puritan  morality, 
not  only  in  theory  and  desire  like  Spenser,  but  in  the 
hard  practice  of  actual  life.  When  the  idea  of  duty  comes 
to  dominate  a  man,  the  grace  and  impetuosity  of  youth, 
the  overmastering  love  of  beauty,  and  the  appreciation 
of  the  mere  joy  of  living  are  apt  to  die  away,  and  the 
poetic  fire  burns  low.  But  it  was  not  so  with  Milton.  To 
the  end  of  his  Hfe  he  remained  a  true  EHzabethan, 
but  an  Elizabethan  who  had  always  kept  himself  free 
from  the  chains  of  sensual  vice,  and  had  never  stained  his 
purity  of  soul.  That  fact  makes  him  unique  almost  in 
Enghsh  history,  and  has  everywhere  added  a  touch  of 
the  sublime  to  all  that  his  works  have  of  beauty.  "  His 
soul  was  like  a  star,  and  dwelt  apart : "  and  we  may 
entirely  believe  what  he  tells  us  of  himself  when  he 
returned  from  his  European  travels  :  "  In  all  the  places 
in  which  vice  meets  with  so  little  discouragement,  and  is 
protected  with  so  little  shame,  I  never  once  turned  from 
the  path  of  integrity  and  virtue,  and  perpetually  reflected 
that,  though  my  conduct  might  escape  the  notice  of  men, 
it  could  not  elude  the  inspection  of  God."  Like  the 
true  Puritan  he  was,  Milton  not  only  overcame  evil  in 
himself,  but  he  thought  his  own  life  and  health  a  cheap 
price  to  pay  for  the  overthrow  of  evil  wherever  he  saw  it. 
When  the  civil  war  broke  out,  he  returned  at  once  from 
his  travels,  to  help  to  right  the  wrongs  01  his  country. 
In  the  service  of  the  Government  he  sacrificed  his  poetic 
gift,  his  leisure  for  twenty  years,  and  finally  his  sight, 
to  the  task  of  defending  England  from  her  enemies.  But 
he  did  not  stop  there.  His  severity  became  excessive, 
at  times  almost  vindictive.  When  he  wrote  prose  he 
scarcely  ever  wrote  without  having  an  enemy  to  crush, 
and  much  that  he  uttered  in  this  vein  cannot  possibly 
be  approved.  His  pamphlets  are  unfair  to  a  degree  which 
shows   that   his    mind    had    tost    balance  in    the    turmoil 

13 


194  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

of  the  great  struggle,  so  that  he  approached  at  moments 
the  narrower  Puritanism.  But  he  still  proved  himself 
too  great  for  that,  and  emerged  anew  as  a  great  and 
lofty  spirit,  held  down  very  little  by  earthly  bonds,  and 
strenuously  set  against  evil  as  a  true  servant  of  God. 

Now  the  temper  of  Puritanism  such  as  this  of  these 
old  English  worthies  is  precisely  what  Christians  need 
most  to  cultivate  in  these  days.  They  must  be  animated 
by  the  spirit  which  refuses  to  touch,  and  refers  to  God, 
whatever  proves  hostile  to  life  in  God  ;  but  they  must 
also  combine  with  this  aloofness  a  sympathetic  hold  on 
ordinary  life.  It  is  easy  on  the  one  hand  to  solve  all 
problems  by  cutting  oneself  off  from  any  relation  with 
the  world,  lest  the  inner  life  should  suffer.  It  is  also  easy 
to  let  the  inner  life  take  care  of  itself,  and  to  float  blithely 
on  with  all  the  currents  of  life  which  are  not  deadly  sins. 
But  it  is  not  easy  to  keep  the  mind  and  life  open  to  all 
the  great  life-streams  which  tend  to  deepen  and  enrich 
human  nature,  and  yet  to  stand  firm  in  self-control, 
determined  that  nothing  which  drags  down  the  soul 
shall  be  permitted  to  fascinate  or  overpower.  To  this 
task  Christian  men  and  the  Christian  Church  seem  at 
present  to  be  specially  called.  It  is  admitted  on  all 
hands  that  the  ordinary  Puritanism  became  too  intolerant 
of  all  except  spiritual  interests  ;  so  that  it  could  not,  without 
infinite  loss,  have  been  accepted  as  the  guide  for  all  life. 
But  hence  what  was  good  in  it  has  been  rejected  along 
wdth  the  bad  ;  and  it  needs  to  be  restored,  if  a  weak, 
self-indulgent  temper,  which  resents  hardship  or  even 
discipline,  is  not  to  gain  the  upper  hand.  In  social  life 
especially  this  is  needful,  otherwise  so  much  debate  would 
never  have  been  expended  on  the  question  of  amusements. 
On  the  face  of  it,  a  Christianity  which  can  go  with  the 
world  in  all  those  of  its  amusements  which  are  not 
actually   forbidden    by   the   moral    law   must    be   a    low 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  195 

type  of  Christianity.  It  can  be  conscious  of  no  special 
character  which  it  has  to  preserve,  of  no  special  voice 
which  it  has  to  utter  in  the  antiphony  of  created  things. 
Whatever  others  allow  themselves,  therefore,  the  vigilant 
Christian  must  see  to  it  that  he  does  nothing  which  will 
destroy  his  special  contribution  to  the  world  he  lives  in. 
It  is  precisely  by  that  that  he  is  the  salt  of  the  earth ;  and 
if  the  salt  have  lost  its  savour  wherewith  will  you  season 
it  ?  No  price  is  too  great  for  the  preservation  of  this 
savour,  and  in  reference  to  the  care  of  it  each  man  must 
ultimately  be  a  law  unto  himself.  No  one  else  can  really 
tell  where  his  weakness  lies.  No  one  else  can  know 
what  the  effect  of  this  or  that  recreation  upon  that  weak- 
ness is. 

When  men  lose  spiritual  touch  with  their  own  character 
they  are  apt  to  throw  themselves  back  for  guidance  in 
such  matters  upon  the  general  opinion  of  the  Christian 
community,  or  the  tradition  of  the  elders.  In  doing  so  they 
are  in  danger  of  losing  sincerity  in  a  mass  of  formalism. 
But  if  a  vivid  apprehension  of  the  need  of  individuahty 
in  the  regulation  of  life  is  maintained,  the  formulated 
Christian  objection  to  certain  customs  or  certain  amuse- 
ments may  be  a  most  useful  substitute  for  painful  experience 
of  our  own.  Some  such  amusements  may  have  been 
banned  in  the  past  without  sufficient  reason  ;  or  they  may 
have  been  excluded  only  because  of  the  special  open- 
ness to  temptation  of  a  certain  community ;  or  they  may 
have  so  changed  their  character  that  they  do  not  now 
deserve  the  ban  which  was  laid  upon  them  once  justly 
enough.  Any  plea,  therefore,  for  the  revisal  or  abolition 
of  standing  conventions  on  such  grounds  must  be  Hstened 
to  and  judged.  But,  on  the  whole,  these  standing  prohibi- 
tions of  the  Church  represent  accumulated  experience, 
and  all  young  people  especially  will  do  wisely  not  to  break 
avs^ay  from  them.     What  the  mass  of  Christians  in  the 


196  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

past  have  found  hurtful  to  the  Christian  character  will  in 
most  cases  be  hurtful  still.  For  if  it  can  be  said  of  the 
secular  world  in  all  matters  of  experience  that  "  this  wise 
world  is  mainly  right,"  it  may  surely  be  said  also  of  the 
Christian  community.  In  our  time  there  is  a  quite 
justifiable  distrust  of  conventionality  in  morals  and  in 
religion ;  but  it  should  not  be  forgotten  that  conventions 
are  not  open  to  the  same  objection.  They  represent, 
on  the  whole,  merely  the  registered  results  of  actual 
experience,  and  they  may  be  estimated  and  followed  in 
an  entirely  free  spirit.  It  is  not  wise,  therefore,  to  revolt 
against  them  indiscriminately,  merely  because  they  may 
be  used  cruelly  against  others,  or  may  be  taken  as  a 
substitute  for  a  moral  nature  by  oneself  Thackeray  in 
his  constant  railing  at  the  judgment  of  the  world  seems  to 
make  this  mistake.  He  is  never  weary  in  pointing  out 
how  unjust  the  broad  general  judgments  of  the  world  are 
to  specially  selected  individuals.  Harry  Warrington  in 
The  Virginians,  for  instance,  though  innocent,  lives  in  a 
manner  and  with  associates  which  the  world  has  generally 
found  to  indicate  intolerable  moral  laxity ;  and  because  the 
world  was  wrong  in  thinking  that  to  be  true  in  his  case 
which  would  have  been  true  in  ninety-five  out  of  a 
hundred  similar  cases,  the  moralist  rails  at  the  evil- 
hearted  judgments  of  the  world.  But  "  this  wise  world 
is  mainly  right,"  and  its  rough  and  indiscriminating 
judgments  fit  the  average  case.  They  are  part  of  the 
great  sanitary  provision  which  society  makes  for  its  own 
preservation.  And  the  case  is  precisely  similar  with  the 
conventions  of  the  religious  life.  They  too  are  in  the 
main  sanitary  precautions,  which  a  conscience  thoroughly 
alive  and  a  strong  intelligence  may  make  superfluous,  but 
which  for  the  unformed,  the  half-ignorant,  the  less  original 
natures,  in  a  word,  for  average  men  and  women,  are 
absolutely  necessary.    Spontaneity  and  freedom  are  admir- 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  197 

able  qualities  in  morals  and  religion.  They  are  even  the 
conditions  of  the  highest  kinds  of  moral  and  religious  life, 
and  the  necessary  presuppositions  of  health  and  progress. 
But  something  is  due  to  stability  as  well ;  and  a  world  of 
original  and  spontaneous  moralists,  trusting  only  to  their 
own  *' genial  sense"  of  truth,  would  be  a  maddening 
chaos.  In  other  words,  conventions  if  used  unconven- 
tionally, if  not  exalted  into  absolute  moral  laws  dis- 
obedience to  which  excludes  from  reputable  society,  if 
taken  simply  as  indications  of  the  paths  in  which  least 
danger  to  the  higher  life  has  been  found  to  lie,  are  guides 
for  which  men  may  well  be  thankful. 

In  the  world  of  thought  too,  as  well  as  in  the  world 
of  action,  a  wise  austerity  of  self-control  is  absolutely 
necessary.  The  prevailing  theory  is  that  every  one,  young 
men  more  especially,  should  read  on  all  sides  on  all 
questions,  and  that  they  should  know  and  sympathise 
with  all  modes  of  thought.  This  is  advocated  in  the 
supposed  interests  of  freedom  from  external  domination 
and  from  internal  prejudice.  But  in  a  great  number  of 
cases  the  result  does  not  follow.  Such  catholicity  of  taste 
does  produce  a  curious  dilettante  interest  in  lines  of 
thought,  but  as  a  rule  it  weakens  interest  in  truth  as  such. 
It  delivers  from  the  domination  of  a  Church  or  other 
historic  authority ;  but  only,  in  most  cases,  to  hand  over 
the  supposed  freeman  to  the  narrower  domination  of  the 
thinker  or  school  by  which  he  happens  to  be  most  impressed. 
For  it  is  vain  and  impotent  to  suppose  that  in  regard 
to  morals  and  religion  every  mind  is  able  to  find  its  way 
by  free  thought,  when  in  regard  to  bodily  health,  or  even 
in  questions  of  finance,  the  free  thought  of  the  amateur 
is  acknowledged  to  end  usually  in  confusion.  Those 
only  can  usefully  expose  their  minds  to  all  the  various 
currents  of  modern  thought  who  have  a  clear  footing  of 
their  own.     Whatever  that  may  be,  it  gives  them  a  point 


198  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

on  which  to  stand,  and  a  vantage-ground  from  which  they 
can  gather  up  what  widens  or  corrects  their  view.  But 
to  leave  the  land  altogether,  and  commit  oneself  to  the 
currents,  is  to  render  any  after-landing  all  but  impossible. 
With  regard  to  the  books  read,  the  lines  of  thought 
followed,  and  the  associations  formed,  the  Christian 
must  exercise  self-denial  and  self-examination.  What- 
ever is  manifestly  detrimental  to  his  best  life,  whatever 
he  feels  to  be  likely  to  taint  the  purity  of  his  mind  or 
lower  his  spiritual  vitality,  should  be  put  under  the 
**  ban,"  should  be  resolutely  avoided  in  all  ordinary 
cases.  Of  course  modes  of  thought  that  deserve  to 
be  weighed  may  be  found  mingled  with  such  elements ; 
also  views  of  life  which  have  a  truth  and  importance 
of  their  ovv^n,  though  their  setting  is  corrupt.  But  it 
is  not  every  one's  business  to  extricate  and  discuss 
these.  Those  who  are  called  to  it  will  have  to  do  it ; 
and  in  doing  it  as  a  duty  they  may  expect  to  be 
kept  from  the  lurking  contagion.  Every  one  else  who 
investigates  them  runs  a  risk  which  he  was  not  called 
upon  to  run.  The  average  Christian  should,  therefore, 
note  all  that  tends  to  stunt  or  deprave  him  spiritually,  and 
should  avoid  it.  It  is  not  manliness  but  folly  which  makes 
men  read  filthy  literature  because  of  its  style,  or  sceptical 
literature  because  of  its  ability,  when  they  are  not  called 
upon  to  do  so,  and  when  they  have  not  fortified  them- 
selves by  the  purity  of  the  Scriptures  and  the  power  of 
prayer.  To  make  such  literature  or  such  modes  of 
thought  our  staple  mental  food,  or  to  make  the  writers 
or  admirers  of  such  books  our  intimate  friends,  is  to  sap 
our  own  best  convictions  and  to  disregard  our  high 
calling. 

Lastly,  however  common  it  m.ay  be  for  men  to  sit  down 
in  selfish  isolation  and  devote  themselves  to  their  own 
interests,  even    though  these   be  spritual,  in  the  face  of 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  199 

remediable  evils,   that   is   not    the   Christian   manner    of 
acting.     Of  the  great    Puritans   we   mentioned,  Spenser 
endured  hardness   in    that   terrible  Irish  war  which  the 
men  of  Elizabeth's   day   regarded  as   the   war   of  good 
against   evil ;    Hutchinson    fought    for   and    died   in    the 
cause   of    political   and   religious    freedom ;    and    Milton 
devoted   his  life  and  health   to  the   same  cause.     All  of 
them,   the  two  latter  especially,  might  have  kept  out  of 
it  all,  in  the  peace  and  comfort  of  private  life ;  but  they 
judged  that  the  destruction  of  evil  was  their  first  duty. 
At  the  trumpet  call    they  willingly  took  their  side,  and 
prepared  to  give  their  lives,  if  necessary,  for  the  righteous 
cause.     Now  it  is  not  enough  for  us  to    avoid   evil    any 
more  than  it  was  for  them.     Though  personal  influence 
and   example   are    undoubtedly  among   the  most   potent 
weapons  in  the  warfare  for  the  Kingdom  of  God,  there 
must  be,  besides   these,  the  power  and   the  will    to    put 
public    evils    under   the    ban.      Whatever    institution    or 
custom  or   law   is  ungodly,  whatever  in   our   social   life 
is    manifestly    unjust,    should  stir    the   Christian    Church 
to   revolt    against   it,    and    should    fill    the    heart   of  the 
individual  Christian  with  an  undying  energy  of  hatred.     It 
is  not  meant  that  the  Christian  Churches  as  such  should 
transform  themselves  into  political  societies  or  social  clubs. 
To  do  that  would  simply  be  to  abdicate  their  only  real 
functions.     But  they  should  be  the  sources  of  such  teach- 
ing as  will  turn  men's  thoughts  towards  social  justice  and 
political  righteousness,  and  should  prepare  them  for  the 
sacrifice  which  any  great  improvement  in  the  social  state 
must  demand  of  some.     Further,  every  individual  Christian 
should  feel  that  his  responsibility  for  the  condition  of  his 
brethren,  those  of  his  own  nation,  is  very  great  and  direct ; 
that  to  discharge  municipal  and  political  duty  with  con- 
scientious care    is  a  primary  obligation.       Only   so   can 
the  power  be  gained  to  ''  ban  "  the  bad  laws,  the  unjust 


200  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

practices,  the   evil    social   customs,    which   disfigure    our 
civilisation,  which  degrade  and  defraud  the  poor. 

A  militant  Puritanism  here  is  not  only  a  necessity  for 
further  social  progress,  but  it  is  also  a  necessity  for  the 
full  exhibition  of  the  power  and  the  essential  sympathies 
of  Christianity.  For  want  of  it  the  working  classes  in 
their  movement  upward  have  not  only  been  ahenated  from 
the  Churches,  but  they  have  learned  to  demand  of  their 
leaders  that  they  shall  ''  countenance  the  poor  man  in  his 
cause."  They  are  tempted  to  require  their  leaders  to 
share  not  only  their  common  principles,  but  their  pre- 
judices ;  and  they  often  look  with  suspicion  upon  those 
who  insist  upon  applying  the  plumb-line  of  justice  to  the 
demands  of  the  poor  as  well  as  to  the  claims  of  the 
rich.  The  whole  popular  movement  suffers,  for  it  is 
degraded  from  its  true  position.  From  being  a  demand 
for  justice,  it  becomes  a  scramble  for  power — power  too 
which,  when  gained,  is  sometimes  used  as  selfishly  and 
tyrannically  by  its  new  possessors  as  it  sometimes  was 
by  those  who  previously  exercised  it.  Into  all  branches 
of  public  life  there  is  needed  an  infusion  of  a  new  and 
higher  spirit.  We  want  men  who  hate  evil  and  will 
destroy  it  where  they  can,  who  seek  nothing  for  them- 
selves, who  feel  strongly  that  the  kind  of  Hfe  the  poor 
in  civilised  countries  live  is  intolerably  hard,  and  are 
prepared  to  suffer,  if  by  any  means  they  may  improve  it. 
But  we  want  at  the  same  time  a  type  of  reformer  who, 
by  his  hold  upon  a  power  lying  beyond  this  world,  is 
kept  steady  to  justice  even  where  the  poor  are  concerned, 
who,  though  he  passionately  longs  for  a  better  life 
for  them,  does  not  make  more  food,  more  leisure,  more 
amusement,  his  highest  aim.  Men  are  needed  who  think 
more  nobly  of  their  brethren  than  that :  men,  on  the 
one  hand,  who  know  that  the  Christian  character  and 
the  Christian  virtues  may  exist  under  the  hardest  con- 


THE  BAN  IN  MODERN  LIFE  201 

ditions,  and  that  the  Christian  Church  exists  mainly  to 
brighten  and  rob  of  its  degradation  the  otherwise  cheerless 
life  of  the  multitude ;  but,  on  the  other,  who  recognise 
that  our  present  social  state  is  fatal  in  many  ways  to 
moral  and  spiritual  progress  for  the  mass  of  men,  and 
must  be  in  some  way  recast. 

All  this  means  the  entrance  into  public  life  of  Christian 
men  of  the  highest  type.  Such  men  the  Christian 
community  must  supply  to  the  State  in  great  numbers, 
if  the  higher  characteristics  of  our  people  are  not  to  be 
lost.  Through  a  long  and  eventful  history,  by  the  mani- 
fold training  afforded  by  religion  and  experience,  the 
English  nation  has  become  strong,  patient,  hopeful,  and 
self-reliant,  with  an  instinct  for  justice  and  a  hatred  of 
violence  which  cannot  easily  be  paralleled.  It  has,  too, 
retained  a  faith  in  and  respect  for  religion  which  many 
other  nations  seem  to  have  lost.  That  character  is  its 
highest  achievement,  and  its  decay  would  be  deplorable. 
Christianity  is  specially  called  to  help  to  preserve  it,  by 
bringing  to  its  aid  the  power  of  its  own  special  character, 
with  its  great  spiritual  resources.  The  sources  of  its 
life  are  hid,  and  must  be  kept  pure ;  the  power  of  its 
life  must  be  made  manifest  in  actual  union  with  the  higher 
elements  in  the  national  character  for  mutual  defence. 
Above  all,  Christianity  must  not,  timidly  or  sluggishly, 
draw  upon  itself  the  curse  of  Meroz  by  not  coming  to 
the  help  of  the  Lord  against  the  mighty.  Nor  can  it 
permit  the  immediate  interests  of  the  respectable  to  blind 
or  hold  it  back.  That  which  is  best  in  its  own  nature 
demands  all  this ;  and  in  seeking  to  answer  that  demand 
the  Churches  will  attain  to  a  quite  new  life  and  power. 
The  Lord  their  God  will  be  in  the  midst  of  them,  and 
they  will  feel  it ;  for  they  will  then  have  made  themselves 
channels  for  the  Divine  purity  and  power. 


CHAPTER   XI 

THE  BREAD   OF  THE  SOUL 
Deut.  viii. 

IN  the  chapters  which  follow,  viz.  viii.,  ix.,  and  x.  i-ii, 
we  have  an  appeal  to  history  as  a  motive  for  fulfilling 
the  fundamental  duty  of  loving  God  and  keeping  His 
commandments.  In  its  main  points  it  is  substantially 
the  same  appeal  which  is  made  in  chapters  i. — iii.,  is, 
in  fact,  a  continuation  of  it.  Its  main  characteristics, 
therefore,  have  already  been  dealt  with ;  but  there  are 
details  here  which  deserve  more  minute  study.  Coming 
after  Yahweh's  great  demand  for  the  love  of  His  people, 
the  references  to  the  Divine  action  in  the  past  assume 
a  deeper  and  more  affectionate  character  than  when  they 
were  mere  general  exhortations  to  obedience  and  submis- 
sion. They  become  inducements  to  the  highest  efforts 
of  love;  and  the  first  appeal  is  naturally  made  to  the 
gracious  and  fatherly  dealing  of  Yahweh  with  His  people 
in  their  journey  through  the  wilderness.  Of  all  the  tradi- 
tions or  reminiscences  of  Israel,  this  of  the  wilderness  was 
the  most  constantly  present  to  the  popular  mind,  and  it 
is  always  referred  to  as  the  most  certain,  the  most  impres- 
sive, and  the  most  touching  of  all  Israel's  historic  experi- 
ences. Yet  Stade  and  others  push  the  whole  episode 
aside,  saying,  if  any  Israelites  came  out  of  Egypt,  we  do 
not  know  who  they  were.  Such  a  mode  of  deahng  with 
clear,  coherent,  and  in  themselves  not  improbable  his- 
torical memories,  is  too  arbitrary  to  have  much  effect,  and 

202 


viii.]  THE  BREAD   OF  THE  SOUL  203 

the  wilderness  journey  remains,  and  is  likely  to  remain, 
one  of  the  indubitable  facts  which  modern  critical  research 
has  established  rather  than  shaken. 

To  this,  then,  our  author  turns,  and  he  deals  with  it 
in  a  somewhat  unusual  way.  As  we  have  seen,  the 
prevalent  notion  that  piety  and  righteousness  are  rewarded 
with  material  prosperity  is  firmly  rooted  in  his  mind. 
But  he  did  not  feel  himself  limited  to  that  as  the 
solitary  right  way  of  regarding  the  providence  of  God. 
Men's  minds  are  never  quite  so  simple  and  direct  in 
their  action  as  many  students  and  critics  are  tempted 
to  suppose.  Every  great  conception  which  holds  the 
minds  of  men  produces  its  effects,  even  from  the  first 
moment  it  is  grasped,  by  all  that  is  in  it.  Implications 
and  developments  which  are  made  explicit,  or  are  called 
out  into  visibility,  only  by  the  friction  of  new  environ- 
ments, have  been  there  from  the  beginning ;  and  minds 
have  been  secretly  moulded  by  them  though  they  were 
not  conscious  of  them.  Hard  and  fast  lines,  then,  are  not 
to  be  drawn  between  the  stages  of  a  great  development,  so 
that  one  should  say  that  before  such  and  such  a  moment, 
when  a  new  aspect  of  the  old  truth  has  emerged  into  con- 
sciousness, that  aspect  was  not  effective  in  any  wise. 
The  outburst  of  waters  from  a  reservoir  is  indubitable 
evidence  of  steady  persistent  pressure  from  within  in  that 
direction  before  the  overflow.  Similarly,  in  the  region 
of  thought  and  feeling  the  emergence  of  a  new  aspect 
of  truth  is  of  itself  a  proof  that  the  holders  of  the  root 
conception  were  already  sv/ayed  in  that  direction. 

The  history  of  Christianity  affords  proof  of  this.  It 
is  a  commonplace  to-day  that  the  world  is  only  begin- 
ning to  do  justice  to  some  aspects  of  the  teaching  of  our 
Lord.  But  the  teaching,  always  present,  always  exerted 
its  influence,  and  was  felt  before  it  could  be  explained.  In 
the  Old  Testament  development  the  same  thing  was  most 


c 


204  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

emphatically  true.  Individual  responsibility  to  God  was 
not,  so  far  as  we  can  now  see,  distinctly  present  in 
Israelite  religious  thought  till  the  time  of  Jeremiah,  but 
it  would  be  absurd  to  say  that  any  mind  that  accepted 
the  religion  of  Yahweh  had  ever  been  without  that  feeling. 
So  with  the  doctrine  of  God's  providence  over  men  :  we 
are  not  to  say  that  before  the  Book  of  Job  the  explanation 
of  suffering  as  testing  discipline  had  been  entirely  hid 
from  Israel,  by  the  view  that  material  prosperity  and 
adversity  were  regulated  in  the  main  according  to  moral 
and  religious  life.  Consequently,  notwithstanding  previous 
strong  assertions  of  the  latter  view  which  we  find  in 
Deuteronomy,  we  need  not  be  in  the  least  surprised  to 
find  that  here  the  hardships  of  the  wilderness  journey  are 
regarded,  not  as  a  punishment  for  Israel's  sins,  but  simply 
as  a  trial  or  test  to  see  what  their  heart  was  towards 
Him.  This  is  essentially  the  point  of  view  of  the  Book 
of  Job,  the  only  difference  being  that  here  it  is  applied 
to  the  nation,  there  to  the  individual.  But  our  chapter 
rises  even  above  that,  for  the  first  verses  of  it  plainly 
teach  that  the  experiences  of  the  wilderness  were 
made  to  be  what  they  were,  in  order  that  the  people 
might  learn  to  know  the  spiritual  forces  of  the  world  to 
be  the  essential  forces,  and  that  they  might  be  induced 
to  throw  themselves  back  upon  them  as  that  which  is 
^ne  enduring.  In  the  words  of  ver.  3,  they  were  taught 
by  this  training  that  man  does  not  live  by  bread  alone, 
_but  by  everything  that  proceeds  from  the  mouth  of  God. 

These  two  then,  that  hardship  was  testing  discipline 
for  Israel,  and  that  it  was  also  intended  to  be  the  means 
of  revealing  spirit  as  the  supreme  force  even  in  the 
material  world,  are  the  main  lessons  of  the  eighth  chapter. 
Of  these  the  last  is  by  far  the  most  important.  Casting 
back  his  eye  upon  the  past,  the  author  of  Deuteronomy 
teaches  that  the  trials  and  the  victories,  the  wonders  and 


viii.]  THE  BREAD   OF  THE  SOUL  205 

the  terrors  of  their  wilderness  time  were  meant  to  humble 
them,  to  emptyTh~e!Tr^f~th"eTFbwn  conceits,  and  to  make 
them  know  beyond  all  doubting  that  God  alone  was  their 
portion,  and  that  apart  from  Him  they  had  no  certainty 
of  continuance  in  the  future  and  no  sustainment  in  the 
present.  "  All  the  commandment  which  I  command  thee 
this  day  shall  ye  observe  to  do,  that  ye  may  live  J''  is  the 
fundamental  note,  and  the  physical  needs  and  trials  of  the 
time  are  cited  as  an  object-lesson  to  that  effect.  ''  He  j 
humbled  thee,  and  suffered  thee  to  hunger,  and  fed  thee  | 
with  manna  which  thou  knewest  not;  that  He  might  make  | 
thee  to  know  that  man  doth  not  live  by  bread  alone,  but  I 
by  everything  that  proceedeth  out  of  the  mouth  of  Yahweh 
doth  man  live."  Of  course  the  first  reference  of  the 
"  everything  that  proceedeth "  is  to  the  creative  word  of 
Yahweh.  The  meaning  is  that  the  sending  of  the  manna 
was  proof  that  the  ordinary  means  of  living,  i.e.  bread, 
could  be  dispensed  with  when  Yahweh  chose  to  make 
use  of  His  creative  power.  Many  commentators  think 
that  this  exhausts  the  meaning  of  the  passage,  and  they 
regard  our  Lord's  use  of  these  words  in  the  Temptation 
as  limited  in  the  same  fashion.  But  both  here  and  in  the 
New  Testament  more  must  be  intended.  Here  we  have 
the  statement  in  the  first  verse  that  Israel  is  to  keep  the 
commandments,  which  certainly  are  a  part  of  "all  that 
proceeds "  from  the  mouth  of  God,  that  they  may  live. 
This  implies  that  the  mere  possession  of  material  sus- 
tenance is  not  enough  for  even  earthly  life.  Impalpable 
spiritual  elements  must  be  mingled  with  "  bread  "  if  fife 
is  not  to  decay.  This,  our  chapter  goes  on  to  say,  would 
be  plain  to  them  if  they  would  carefully  consider  God's 
deahng  with  them  in  the  wilderness,  for  the  sending  of 
the  manna  was  meant  to  emphasise  and  bring  home  to 
them  that  very  truth.  It  was  meant,  in  short,  to  convey 
a  double  lesson — the  direct  one  above  referred  to,  and  the 


2o6  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


more  remote  but  deeper  one  which  had  been  asserted  in 
the  first  verse. 

In  the  Temptation  narrative  the  same  deeper  meaning 
is   surely  impHed.     The    temptation    suggested    to    Jesus 
was  that  He  should  use  the  miraculous  powers  given  to 
Him  for  special  purposes  to  make  stones  into  bread  for 
Himself.     Now  that  would  have  been  precisely  an  instance 
of  the  literal  primary  meaning  of  our  passage  ;  it  would 
have  been  a  case  of  supplying  the  absence  of  bread  by  the 
use  of  the  creative  word  of  God.     To  meet  that  temptation 
and  to  put  it  aside  our  Lord  uses    these  words :  "  It  is 
written,  Man  shall  not  live  by  bread  alone,  but  by  every 
word  that  proceedeth  out  of  the  mouth  of  God."     There- 
upon He  was  no  more  importuned  to  supply  the  place  of 
bread  by  a  creative  word.     The    implication    is  that  the 
life    of  the    Son    of  God    found    sustenance    in    spiritual 
strength  derived  from  His  Father.     In  other  words,   the 
passage    is    really    parallel   to  John    iv.    3 1  ff :     "  In  the 
mean  while  the  disciples  prayed  Him,  saying,   Rabbi,  eat. 
But  He  said  unto  them,  I  have  meat  to  eat  that  ye  know 
not.     The  disciples  therefore  said  one  to  another.   Hath 
any  man  brought  Him  to  eat  ?     Jesus  saith  unto  them.  My 
meat  is  to  do  the  will  of  Him  that  sent  Me,  and  to  accom- 
plish His  work."     Understanding  it  thus,  the  Temptation 
passage  is  entirely  in  accord  with  that  from  which  it  is 
quoted,    if  the   first  and  third  verses  be  taken  together. 
Both  teach  that  abundance  of  material  resources,  all  that 
visibly  sustains  the  material  life,  is  not  sufficient  for  the 
life  of  such  a  creature  as  man.     Not  only  his  inner  life, 
but  his  outer  life,  is  dependent  for  its  permanence  upon 
the  inflow  of  spiritual  sustenance  from  the  spiritual  God. 
For  animals,  bread  might  be  enough  ;  but  man  holds  of 
both  the  spiritual  and  the  material    as    animals   do    not. 
It  is  not  mere  mythical  dreaming  when  man  is  said  to  be 
made  in  the  image  of  God  ;  it  expresses  the  essential  fact 


viii.]  THE  BREAD   OF  THE  SOUL  207 

of  his  being.  Consequently,  without  inbreathings  from  the 
spiritual,  even  his  physical  life  pines  and  dies.  But  how 
wonderful  is  this  insight  in  a  writer  so  ancient,  belonging 
to  so  obscure  a  people  as  the  Jews  !  How  can  we  account 
for  it  ?  There  was  nothing  in  their  character  or  destiny 
as  a  people  to  explain  it,  apart  from  the  supernatural  link 
that  binds  them  and  their  thoughts  at  all  times  to  the 
coming  Christ,  and  draws  them,  notwithstanding  all 
aberrations,  even  when  they  know  it  not,  towards 
Him. 

How  great  an  attainment  it  is  we  may  see,  if  we  reflect 
for  a  moment  upon  the  state  of  Christian  Europe  at  the 
present  day.  Nowhere  among  the  masses  of  the  most 
cultured  nations  is  this  deeply  simple  truth  accepted  by 
the  vast  majority  of  men.  Nowhere  do  we  find  that 
history  has  succeeded  in  bringing  it  home  to  the  conscience 
as  a  commonplace.  The  rich  or  well-to-do  cling  to  riches, 
the  means  of  material  enjoyment,  as  if  their  life  did  consist 
in  the  abundance  of  things  they  possess.  They  strive  and 
struggle  for  them  with  an  industry,  a  forethought,  a 
perseverance,  which  would  be  justified  only  if  man  could 
live  by  bread  alone.  That  is  largely  the  condition  of  those 
who  have  bread  in  abundance  or  hope  to  gain  it  abun- 
dantly. With  those  who  do  not  have  it  the  case  is  perhaps 
even  worse.  Worn  and  fretted  by  the  hopeless  struggle 
against  poverty,  driven  wild  by  the  exigencies  of  a  daily 
life  so  near  starvation  point  that  a  strike,  a  fall  in  prices,  a 
month's  sickness,  bring  them  face  to  face  with  miser}^,  the 
toiling  masses  in  Europe  have  turned  with  a  kind  of  wolfish 
impatience  upon  those  who  talk  of  God  to  them,  and 
demand  "  bread."  As  a  German  Socialist  m.other  said 
publicly  some  years  ago,  "  He  has  never  given  me  a 
-j»6uthful  of  bread,  or  means  to  gain  it  :  what  have  I  to  do 
v/ith  your  God  ?  "  Their  only  hope  for  the  future  is  that 
they  may  eat  and  be  full ;  and  of  this  they    have   made 


2o8  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

a   political  and   religious   ideal  which   is    attracting    the 
European  working  classes  with  most  portentous  power. 

In  all  countries  men  are  passionately  asserting  that 
man  can  live  by  bread  alone,  and  that  he  will.  For  this 
dreadful  creed  increasing  numbers  are  prepared  to  sacrifice 
all  that  humanity  thought  it  had  gained,  and  shut  their 
ears  to  any  who  warn  them  that,  if  they  had  all  they  seek, 
earth  might  be  still  more  of  a  Pandemonium  than  they 
think  it  at  present.  But  they  have  much  excuse.  They 
have  never  had  wealth  so  as  to  know  how  very  little  it 
can  do  for  the  deepest  needs  of  men ;  and  their  faith  in  it, 
their  belief  that  if  they  were  assured  of  a  comfortable 
maintenance  all  would  be  right  with  the  world,  is  pathetic 
in  its  simplicity.  Yet  the  secret  that  is  hid  to-day  from 
the  mass  of  men  was  known  among  the  small  Israelite 
people  two  thousand  five  hundred  years  ago.  Since  then 
it  has  formed  the  very  keynote  of  the  teaching  of  our 
Lord  ;  but  save  by  the  generations  of  Christians  who  have 
found  in  it  the  key  to  much  of  the  riddle  of  the  world 
it  has  been  learned  by  nobody. 

Yet  history  has  never  wearied  in  proclaiming  the  same 
truth.  Israel  as  we  have  seen,  had  verified  it  in  the 
history  of  the  pre-Canaanite  races  whose  disappearance  is 
recorded  in  the  first  section  of  our  book,  and  in  the  doom 
which  was  impending  over  the  Canaanites.  But  to  our 
wider  experience,  enriched  by  the  changes  of  more  than 
two  thousand  years,  and  by  the  still  more  striking 
vicissitudes  of  ancient  days  revealed  by  archaeology,  the 
fact  that  intelligence  of  the  highest  kind,  practical  skill, 
and  the  courage  of  conquerors  cannot  secure  "  life,"  is 
only  more  impressively  brought  home.  If  we  go  back  to 
the  pre-Semitic  empire  of  Mesopotamia,  to  what  is  called 
the  Akkadian  time,  we  find  that,  before  the  days  of 
Abraham,  a  great  civilisation  had  arisen,  flourished  for 
more    than    one    thousand   ^^ears,    and   then   decayed   so 


viii.]  THE  BREAD   OF  THE  SOUL  209 

utterly  that  the  very  language  in  which  its  records  were 
written  had  to  be  dealt  with  by  the  Semites,  who  inherited 
the  former  culture,  as  we   deal   with   Latin.     Yet  these 
early  people  had   made  a  most  astonishing  advance  into 
the  ocean  of  unknown  truth.     They  had  invented  writing  ; 
they  had  elaborate   systems  ol  law  and  social  life  ;  they 
had   in  other  directions  made  remarkable  discoveries  in 
science,     especially    in    mathematical     and     astronomical 
science,  and  had  built  great  cities  in  which  the  refinement 
and  art  of  modern  times  was  in  many  directions  antici- 
pated.   In  all  ways  they  stood  far  higher  above  neighbouring 
peoples  than  any  civilised  nation  of  Europe  stands  now 
in  comparison  with  its  neighbours.     But  if  they  were  at 
all  inclined  to  put  their  trust  in  the  immortality  of  science, 
if  they  ever  valued  themselves,  as  we  do,  on  the  strength 
of  the  advances  they   had  made,   time  has  had  them  in 
derision.     Very  much  of  what  they  knew  had  to  be  re- 
discovered  painfully   in   later   times.     Their   very   name 
perished  out  of  the  earth ;    and   it  has  been  discovered 
now  to  make  them  an  object  of  abiding  interest  only  to 
the    few    who     make    ethnology    their    study.       Neither 
material    wealth   and    comfort    nor   assiduous    culture   of 
the  mind  could  save  them.     For  their  religion  and  morals 
were,  amid  all  this  material  success,  of  the  lowest  type. 
They  heard  little  of  what  issues  from  the  mouth  of  God 
in  the  specially  Divine  sphere  of  morality,  and  did  not  give 
heed  to  that  little,   and  they  perished.      For  man  does 
not  live  by  bread  alone,   but  by  that  also,   and  neglect 
of  it  is  fatal. 

It  may  be  said  that  they  flourished  for  more  than  a 
thousand  years,  and  neglect  of  the  Divine  word,  if  it  be 
a  poison,  must  (as  Fenelon  said  of  coffee)  be  a  very  slow 
one,  so  far  as  nations  are  concerned.  But  it  has  always 
been  a  snare  to  men  to  mistake  the  Divine  patience  for 
Divine  indifference  and  inaction.     The  movement,  though 

14 


2IO  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

to  US  creatures  of  a  day  it  seems  slow,  is  as  continuous,  as 
crushing,  and  as  relentless  as  the  movement  of  a  glacier. 
''  The  mills  of  God  grind  slowly,  but  they  grind  exceeding 
small,"  and  all  along  the  ages  they  have  thrown  out  the 
crushed  and  scattered  fragments  of  the  powers  that  were 
deaf  to  the  Divine  voice.  So  persistently  has  this  appeared 
that  it  would  by  this  time  have  passed  beyond  the  region 
of  faith  into  that  of  sight,  were  it  not  always  possible  to 
ignore  the  moral  cause  and  substitute  for  it  something 
mechanical  and  secondar}^  The  great  world-empires  of 
Egypt  and  Assyria  passed  away,  primarily  owing  to  neglect 
of  the  higher  life.  Secondarily,  no  doubt,  the  ebbs  and 
flows  of  their  power,  and  their  final  extinction,  were  in- 
fluenced by  the  course  of  the  Indian  trade  ;  and  many  wise 
men  think  they  do  well  to  stop  there.  But  in  truth  we 
do  not  solve  the  difficulty  by  resting  in  this  secondary 
cause ;  we  only  shift  it  a  step  backwards.  For  the 
question  immediately  arises.  Why  did  the  trade  change 
its  course  from  Assyria  to  Egypt,  and  back  again  from 
Egypt  to  Assyria  ?  Why  did  a  rivulet  of  it  flow  through 
the  land  of  Israel  in  Solomon's  day  and  afterwards  cease  ? 
The  answer  must  be  that  it  was  when  the  character  of 
these  various  nations  rose  in  vigour  by  foresight  and 
moral  self-restraint  that  they  drew  to  themselves  this 
source  of  power.  They  "  lived,"  in  fact,  by  giving  heed 
to  some  word  of  God.  Nor  does  the  history  of  Greek 
supremacy  in  Europe  and  Asia,  or  the  rise  and  fall  of 
the  Roman  Empire,  contradict  that  view.  The  modern 
historian,  whatever  his  faith  or  unfaith  may  be,  is  driven 
to  find  the  motive  power  which  wrought  in  these  stupend- 
ous movements  in  the  moral  and  spiritual  sphere.  This 
transforms  history  from  being  merely  secular  into  a  Bible, 
as  Mommsen  finely  says,^  **  And  if  she  cannot  any  more 

'  History  of  Rome,  vol.  iv.,  Part  II.,  p.  467. 


viii.]  The  bread  of  the  soul  2ti 

than  the  Bible  hinder  the  fool  from  misunderstanding  and 
the  devil  from  quoting  her,  she  too  will  be  able  to  bear 
with  and  to  requite  them  both."  She  utters  her  voice  in 
the  streets,  and  in  the  end  makes  her  meaning  clear.  For 
she  gives  us  ever  new  examples. 

Probably  her  grandest  object-lesson  at  present  is  the 
wasting  and  paralysis  that  is  slowly  withering  up  all 
Mohammedan  states.  Where  they  have  been  left  to 
themselves,  as  in  Morocco  and  Persia,  depopulation  and 
the  break-up  of  society  has  come  upon  them,  and  where 
Muslim  populations  are  really  prospering  it  is  under  the 
influence  of  Christian  Powers.  And  the  reason  is  plain. 
Islam  is  a  revolt  from,  and  a  rejection  of,  the  higher 
principles  of  life  contained  in  Christianity,  and  a  return 
to  Judaism.  But  the  Judaism  to  which  it  returned  had 
already  lost  its  finest  bloom.  All  that  was  left  to  it  of 
tenderness  or  power  of  expansion  Islam  rejected,  and  of 
the  driest  husks  of  Old  Testament  religion  it  made  its 
sole  food.  Naturally  and  necessarily,  therefore,  it  has 
been  found  inadequate.  It  cannot  permanently  live  under 
present  conditions,  and  it  is  capable  of  no  renewal.  Here 
and  there,  especially  in  India,  attempts  to  break  out  of 
the  prison  house  which  this  system  builds  around  its 
votaries  are  being  made,  but  in  the  opinion  of  experts 
like  Mr.  Sell^  they  cannot  succeed.  "Such  a  movement," 
he  tells  us,  *'may  elevate  individuals  and  purify  the 
family  life  of  many,  but  it  will,  like  all  reform  movements 
of  the  past,  have  very  little  real  effect  on  Islam  as  a 
polity  and  as  a  religion."  If  he  be  right,  we  learn  from  a 
Mohammedan  Vv^hom  he  quotes,  the  Naual  Mulisin-ul-Mulk, 
what  alone  can  be  looked  for.  "  To  me  it  seems,"  he  says, 
"that  as  a  nation  and  a  religion  we  are  dying  out;  our 
day  is  past,  and  we  have  little  hope  of  the  future."     More 

'  CotttempoVary  Review,  August  1893  p.  293, 


212  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

conspicuously  and  deliberately  perhaps  than  any  one  did 
Mohammed  choose  to  go  back  from  the  best  light  that 
shone  in  the  world  of  his  day.  Some  at  least  of  his  con- 
temporaries knew  what  a  spiritual  religion  meant.  He 
was  guilty,  therefore,  of  the  "  great  refusal " ;  and  his  work, 
great  as  it  was,  seems  to  some  even  of  his  own  disciples 
to  be  hastening  to  its  end.  Material  success,  bread  in  all 
senses,  the  kingdoms  founded  by  him  and  his  successors 
had  in  abundance,  and  still  might  have.  But  man  cannot 
live  by  that  alone,  and  the  absence  of  the  higher  element 
has  taken  even  that  away. 

In  Christendom,  too,  the  same  lesson  is  being  taught. 
Of  all  European  countries  France  perhaps  is  that  where 
the  corroding  power  of  materialistic  thought  has  been  most 
severely  felt.  Yet  few  countries  are  so  rich  in  material 
wealth,  and  if  bread  was  all  that  ''  life "  demanded,  no 
country  should  be  so  full  of  it.  But  it  is  in  no  sense  so. 
Even  its  intellectual  life  is  drooping,  and  its  population, 
if  not  decreasing,  is  standing  still.  This,  all  serious 
writers  deplore ;  and  the  dawn  of  what  may  perhaps  be  a 
new  era  is  seen  in  the  earnestness  with  which  the  sources 
of  this  evil  are  sought  out  and  discussed.  Men  like  the 
Vicomte  de  Vogiie^  depict  the  new  generation  as  weary 
of  negations,  sick  of  the  material  positivism  of  their 
immediate  predecessors,  disgusted  with  "  realism,"  which, 
as  another  recent  writer  defines  it,  "  in  thought  is  mere 
provincialism,  in  affection  absolute  egoism,  in  politics  the 
deification  of  brute  force  ;  in  the  higher  grades  of  society 
tyranny ;  in  the  lower,  unbridled  licence."  And  the  only 
cure  is  faith  and  moral  idealism.  *'  Society  can  apply 
to  itself  to-day,"  says  De  Vogue,  "  the  beautiful  image  of 
Plotinus  ;  it  resembles  those  travellers  lost  in  the  night, 
seated  in  silence  on  the  shore  of  the  sea,  waiting  for  the 

»  " Heures  d'Histoire." 


viii.]  THE  BREAD   OF  THE  SOUL 


21- 


sun  to  rise  above  the  billows."  In  Germany  similar 
conditions  have  produced  similar  though  much  mitigated 
results.  Yet  even  there,  Lange,  the  historian  of 
materialism,  tells  us  that  there  runs  through  all  our  modern 
culture  a  tendency  to  materialism,  which  carries  away 
every  one  who  has  not  found  somewhere  a  sure  anchor. 
"  The  ideal  has  no  currency  ;  all  that  cannot  prove  its 
claim  on  the  basis  of  natural  science  and  history  is 
condemned  to  destruction,  though  a  thousand  joys  and 
refreshments  of  the  masses  depend  upon  it."  He  con- 
cludes by  saying  that  "  ideas  and  sacrifices  may  still  save 
our  civilisation,  and  change  the  path  of  destructive 
revolution  into  a  path  of  beneficent  reforms."  Through 
all  history,  then,  and  loudest  in  our  own  day,  the  cry  of 
our  passage  goes  up  ;  and  where  the  path  marked  out  by 
the  faith  of  Israel,  and  carried  to  its  goal  by  Jesus  Christ, 
has  been  forsaken,  the  peoples  are  resting  in  hungry 
expectation.  Words  from  the  mouth  of  God  can  alone 
save  them ;  and  if  the  Churches  cannot  make  them  hear, 
and  no  new  voice  brings  it  home  to  them,  there  would 
seem  to  be  nothing  before  them  but  a  slower  or  quicker 
descent  into  death. 

But  it  may  be  that  the  nations  are  deaf  to  the  Churches' 
voice  because  these  have  not  learned  thoroughly  that  life 
for  them  too  is  conditioned  in  the  same  fashion.  They 
can  live  truly,  fully,  triumphantly  only  when  they  take  up 
and  absorb  "  everything  that  issues  from  the  mouth  of  God." 
All  Christians  must  admit  this  ;  but  most  proceed  at  once 
to  annul  what  they  have  stated  by  the  limitations  of 
meaning  they  impose  upon  it.  An  older  generation 
vehemently  affirmed  this  faith,  meaning  by  it  every  word 
and  letter  which  Scripture  contained.  We  do  not  find 
fault  with  what  they  assert,  for  the  first  necessity  of 
spiritual  life  is  the  study  and  love  of  the  Holy  Scriptures. 
No  one  who  knows  what  the  higher  life  in  Christ  is,  needs 


214  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


to  be  told  that  the  very  bread  of  life  is  in  the  Bible. 
Neglect  it,  or,  what  is  perhaps  worse,  study  it  only  from 
the  scientific  and  intellectual  point  of  view,  and  life  will 
slowly  ebb  away  from  you,  and  your  religion  will  bring 
you  none  of  the  joy  of  living.  Bring  your  thoughts,  your 
hopes,  your  fears,  and  your  aspirations  into  daily  contact 
with  it,  and  you  will  feel  a  vigour  in  your  spiritual  nature 
which  will  make  you  ^'  lords  over  circumstance."  Every 
part  of  it  contributes  to  this  effect  when  it  is  properly 
understood,  for  experience  proves  the  vanity  of  the 
attempt  to  distinguish  between  the  Bible  and  the  word  of 
God.  As  it  stands,  wrought  into  one  whole  by  labours 
the  strenuousness,  the  multiplicity,  the  skill,  and  the  re- 
ligious spirit  of  which  we  are  only  now  coming  to  under- 
stand, it  is  the  word  of  God  ;  it  has  issued  from  His  mouthy 
and  from  it,  searched  out  and  understood,  the  most  satisfy- 
ing '^  bread  "  of  the  soul  must  come.  Only  by  use  of  it  can 
the  Christian  soul  live.  But  though  the  Bible  is  the 
word  of  God  par  excellence,  it  is  not  the  only  word  that 
issues  from  the  mouth  of  God  to  man.  Because  the 
Church  has  often  too  much  refused  to  listen  to  any  other 
word  of  God,  those  who  are  without  are  ^'  sitting  looking 
out  over  the  sea  towards  the  west  for  the  rising  of  the  sun 
which  is  behind  them."  For  if  it  is  death  to  the  spirit  to 
turn  away  from  Scripture,  it  means  sickness  and  disease 
to  refuse  to  learn  the  other  lessons  which  are  set  for  us 
by  the  God  of  truth.  All  true  science  must  contain  a 
revelation  of  Him,  for  it  is  an  exposition  of  the  manner  of 
His  working.  History  too  is  a  Bible,  which  has  been  con- 
firming with  trumpet  tongue  the  truths  of  Scripture  as  we 
have  seen.  Nay,  it  is  a  commentary  upon  the  special 
revelation  given  to  us  through  Israel,  set  for  our  study  by 
the  Author  of  that  revelation.  Further,  we  may  say  that 
the  progress  of  our  Christian  centuries  has  shov/n  us 
heights  and  depths  of  wisdom  in  the  revelation  mankind 


viii.]  THE  BREAD   OF  THE  SOUL  215 

has  received  in  Christ  which,  without  its  light,  we  should 
not  have  known. 

The  spirit  of  Christ  in  regard  to  slavery,  for  instance, 
was  made  manifest  fully  onl}^  in  our  day.  The  true 
relations  of  men  to  each  other,  as  conceived  by  our 
blessed  Lord,  are  evidently  about  to  be  forced  home  upon 
the  world  by  the  turmoils,  the  strikes,  and  the  outrages, 
by  the  wild  demands,  and  the  wilder  hopes  which  are  the 
characteristic  of  our  epoch.  In  the  future,  too,  there 
must  lie  experiences  which  will  make  manifest  to  men  the 
brand  which  the  spirit  of  Christ  puts  upon  war,  with  its 
savagery  and  its  folly.  These  are  only  noteworthy 
instances  of  the  explanation  of  revelation  by  the  develop- 
ments of  the  Divine  purpose  in  the  world.  But  in  count- 
less Vv'ays  the  same  process  is  going  on,  and  the  Church 
which  refuses  to  regard  it  is  preparing  a  decay  of  its  own 
life.  For  man  lives  by  every  word  that  proceedeth  out  of 
the  mouth  of  God,  and  every  such  word  missed  means  a 
loss  of  vitality.  The  Christian  Church,  therefore,  if  it  is 
to  be  true  to  its  calling,  should  be  seriously  watchful  lest 
any  Divinely  sent  experience  should  be  lost  to  it.  It 
cannot  be  indifferent,  much  less  hostile,  to  discoveries  in 
physical  science ;  it  cannot  ignore  any  fact  or  lesson 
which  history  reveals ;  it  cannot  sit  apart  from  social 
experiments,  as  if  holding  no  form  of  creed  in  such  things, 
without  seriously  impairing  its  chances  of  life.  For  all 
these  things  are  pregnant  with  most  precious  indications 
of  the  mind  of  God,  and  to  turn  from  them  is  to  sit  in 
darkness  and  the  shadov/  of  death.  In  the  most  subtle 
and  multifarious  way,  the  inner  spiritual  life  of  man  is 
being  modified  by  the  discoveries  of  scientists,  historians, 
philologists,  archaeologists,  and  critics,  and  by  the  new 
attention  which  is  being  given  to  the  foundations  of  society 
and  social  life.  All  the  truth  that  is  in  these  discoveries 
issues  from  the  mouth  of  God.     They  too  are  a  Bible,  as 


2i6  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Mommsen  says,  and  if  the  Christian  Church  cannot  "  hinder 
the  fool  from  misunderstanding  and  the  devil  from  quoting 
them,"  it  can  itself  listen  with  open  ear  to  these  teachings, 
and  work  them  into  coherent  unity  with  the  great  spiritual 
Revelation.  This  is  the  perennial  task  which  awaits  the 
Church  at  every  stage  of  its  career,  for  on  no  other  terms 
can  it  live  a  healthy  life. 

Here  we  find  the  answer  to  timid  Christians  who  address 
petulant  complaints  to  those  who  are  called  to  attempt 
this  work.  If,  say  they,  these  new  thoughts  are  not 
essential  to  faith,  if  in  the  forms  to  which  we  have  been 
accustomed  the  essence  of  true  religion  has  been  preserved, 
why  do  you  disturb  the  minds  of  believers  by  outside 
questions  ?  The  reply  is  that  we  dare  not  refuse  the 
teaching  which  God  is  sending  us  in  these  ways.  To 
refuse  light  is  to  blaspheme  light.  Though  we  might 
save  our  generation  some  trouble  by  turning  our  back 
upon  this  light,  though  we  might  even  save  some  from 
manifest  shipwreck  of  faith,  we  should  pay  for  that  by 
sacrificing  all  the  future,  and  by  rendering  faith  impossible 
perhaps  for  greater  multitudes  of  our  successors. 

Yet  this  does  not  imply  that  the  Church  is  to  be  driven 
about  by  every  wind  of  doctrine.  Some  men  of  science 
demand,  apparently,  that  every  new  discovery,  in  its  first 
crude  form,  should  be  at  once  adopted  by  the  Church,  and 
that  all  the  inferences  unfavourable  to  received  views 
of  religion,  which  occur  to  men  accustomed  to  think 
only  truths  that  can  be  demonstrated  by  experiment, 
should  be  registered  in  its  teachings.  But  such  a  demand 
is  mere  folly.  The  Church  has  in  its  possession  a  body 
of  truth  which,  if  not  verifiable  by  experiment,  has  been 
verified  by  experience  as  no  other  body  of  truth  has  been. 
Even  its  enemies  being  judges,  no  other  system  of  a  moral 
or  spiritual  kind  has  risen  above  the  horizon  which  can 
for  a  moment  be  compared  with  Christianity  as  the  guide 


viii.]  THE  BREAD   OF   THE  SOUL  217 

of  men  for  life  and  death.^  Through  all  changes  of  secular 
thought,  and  amid  all  the  lessons  which  the  world  has 
taught  the  Church,  the  fundamental  doctrines  have 
remained  in  essence  the  same,  and  by  them  the  whole 
life  of  man,  social,  political,  and  scientific,  has  ultimately 
been  guided.  Immense  practical  interests  have  therefore 
been  committed  to  the  Church's  keeping,  the  interests 
primarily  of  the  poor  and  the  obscure.  She  ought  never 
to  be  tempted,  consequently,  to  think  that  she  is  moving 
and  acting  in  a  vacuum,  or  manage  her  affairs  after  the 
manner  of  a  debating  society.  It  is  no  doubt  a  fault  to 
move  too  slowly ;  but  in  circumstances  hke  that  of  the 
Church,  it  can  never  be  so  destructive  to  the  best  interests 
of  mankind  as  to  move  with  wanton  instability.  Her  true 
attitude  must  be  to  prohibit  no  lines  of  inquiry,  to  open 
her  mind  seriously  to  all  the  demonstrated  truths  of  science 
with  gladness,  to  be  tolerant  of  all  loyal  effort  to  reform 
Christian  thought  in  accordance  with  the  new  light,  when 
that  has  become  at  all  possible.  For  her  true  food  is 
everything  that  issues  from  the  mouth  of  God ;  and  only 
when  she  receives  with  gratitude  her  daily  bread  in  this 
way  also,  can  her  life  be  as  vigorous  and  as  elevated  as 
it  ought  to  be. 

'  Cf.  Lange,  Geschichtc  des  Materialismus,  vol.  ii,,  pp.  510,  528. 


CHAPTER   XII 

ISRAEL'S  ELECTION,   AND  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS 

Deut.  ix-xi. 

THE  remaining  chapters  of  this  special  introduction 
to  the  statement  of  the  actual  laws  beginning  with 
chapter  xii.,  contain  also  an  earnest  insistence  upon  other 
motives  why  Israel  should  remain  true  to  the  covenant 
of  Yahweh.  They  are  urged  to  this,  not  only  because 
life  both  spiritual  and  physical  depended  upon  it,  as  was 
shown  in  the  trials  of  the  wilderness,  but  they  are  also  to 
lay  it  to  heart  that  in  the  conquests  which  assuredly  await 
them,  it  will  be  Yahweh  alone  to  whom  they  will  owe 
them.  The  spies  had  declared,  and  the  people  had 
accepted  their  report,  that  these  peoples  were  far  mightier 
than  they,  and  that  no  one  could  stand  before  the  children 
of  Anak.  But  the  victory  over  them  would  show  that 
Yahweh  had  been  among  them  like  a  consuming  fire, 
before  which  the  Canaanite  power  would  wither  as  brush- 
wood in  the  flame. 

Under  these  circumstances  the  thought  would  obviously 
lie  near  that,  as  they  had  been  defeated  and  driven  back 
in  their  first  attempt  upon  Canaan  because  of  their  un- 
righteousness and  unbelief,  so  they  would  conquer  now 
because  of  their  righteousness  and  obedience.  But  this 
thought  is  sternly  repressed.  The  fundamental  doctrine 
which  is  here  insisted  on  is  that  Israel's  consciousness 
of  being  the  people  of  God  must  at  the  same  time  be  a 
consciousness  of  complete  dependence  upon  Him.     If  His 

218 


ix.-xi.]       ISRAELS  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  219 

gifts  were  ultimately  to  be  the  reward  of  human  righteous- 
ness, then  obviously  that  feeling  of  complete  dependence 
could  not  be  established.  They  are  to  move  so  com- 
pletely in  the  shadow  of  God  that  they  are  to  see  in  their 
successes  only  the  carrying  out  of  the  Divine  purposes. 
Instead  of  feeling  fiercely  contemptuous  of  the  Canaanites 
they  destroy,  because  they  stand  on  a  moral  and  spiritual 
height  which  gives  them  a  right  to  triumph,  the  Israelites 
are  to  feel  that,  while  it  is  for  wickedness  that  the  Canaanite 
people  are  to  be  punished,  they  themselves  had  not  been 
free  from  wickedness  of  an  aggravated  kind.  Their 
different  treatment,  therefore,  rests  upon  the  fact  that 
they  are  to  be  Yahweh's  chosen  instruments.  In  the 
patriarchs  he  chose  them  to  become  the  means,  the 
vehicle,  by  which  salvation  and  blessing  were  to  be  brought 
to  all  nations.  While,  therefore,  the  evil  that  comes  upon 
the  peoples  they  are  to  conquer  is  deserved,  the  good 
they  themselves  are  to  receive  is  equally  undeserved. 
That  which  alone  accounts  for  the  difference  is  the  faith- 
fulness of  God  to  the  promises  He  made  for  the  sake  of 
His  purposes.  He  needs  an  instrument  through  which 
to  bless  mankind.  He  has  chosen  Israel  for  this  purpose, 
partly  doubtless  because  of  some  qualities,  not  necessarily 
spiritual  or  moral,  which  they  have  come  to  have,  and 
partly  because  of  their  historical  position  in  the  world. 
These  taken  together  make  them  at  this  precise  moment 
in  the  history  of  the  world's  development  the  fittest 
instruments  to  carry  out  the  Divine  purpose  of  love  to 
mankind.  And  they  are  elected,  made  to  enter  into  more 
constant  and  intimate  communion  with  God  than  other 
nations,  on  that  account.  In  the  words  of  Rothe,  "God 
chooses  or  elects  at  each  historical  moment  from  the 
totality  of  the  sinful  race  of  mankind  that  nation  by 
whose  enrolment  among  tRe  positive  forces  which  are  to 
develop  the  kingdom  of  God  the  greatest  possible  advance 


220  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

towards  the  complete  realisation  of  it  may  be  attained, 
under  the  historical  circumstances  of  that  mom.ent." 
Whether  that  completely  covers  the  individual  election 
of  St.  Paul,  as  Rothe  thinks,  or  not,  it  certainly  precisely 
expresses  the  national  election  of  the  Old  Testament,  and 
exhausts  the  meaning  of  our  passage.  Israelite  parti- 
cularism had  universality  of  the  highest  kind  as  its  back- 
ground, and  here  the  latter  comes  most  insistently  to  its 
rights. 

It  was  not  only  the  election  of  Israel  to  be  a  peculiar 
people  v/hich  depended  upon  the  wise  and  loving  purpose 
of  God ;  the  providences  which  befell  them  also  had  that 
as  their  source.  To  fit  them  for  their  mission,  and  to 
give  them  a  place  wherein  they  could  develop  the  germs 
of  higher  faith  and  nobler  morality  which  they  had  received, 
Yahweh  gave  them  victory  over  those  greater  nations, 
and  planted  them  in  their  place.  This,  and  this  only, 
was  the  reason  of  their  success;  and  with  scathing  irony 
the  author  of  Deuteronomy  stamps  under  his  feet  (ix.  7  ff.) 
any  claim  to  superior  righteousness  on  their  part.  He 
points  back  to  their  continuous  rebellions  during  the  forty 
years  in  the  wilderness.  From  the  beginning  to  the  end 
of  their  journey  towards  the  promised  land,  they  are 
told,  they  have  been  rebellious  and  stiff-necked  and  un- 
profitable. They  have  broken  their  covenant  with  their 
God.  They  have  caused  Moses  to  break  the  tables  of 
stone  containing  the  fundamental  conditions  of  the  covenant, 
because  their  conduct  had  made  it  plain  that  they  had  not 
seriously  bound  themselves  to  it.  But  the  mercy  of  God 
had  been  with  them.  Notwithstanding  their  sin,  Yahweh 
had  been  turned  to  mercy  by  the  prayer  of  Moses  (vv.  25  ff.), 
and  had  repented  of  His  design  to  destroy  them.  A  new 
covenant  was  entered  into  with  them  (chap,  x.)  by  means 
of  the  second  tables,  which  contained  the  same  commands 
as  were  engraven  on  the  first,     The  renewal,  moreover, 


ix.-xi.]      ISRAEL'S  MOTIVES    FOR  FAITHFULNESS  221 

was  ratified  by  the  separation  of  the  tribe  of  Levi  (x. 
8  ff.)  to  be  the  specially  priestly  tribe,  "  to  bear  the 
Ark  of  the  Covenant  of  the  Lord,  to  stand  before  the 
Lord  to  minister  unto  Him  and  to  bless  in  His  name." 
From  beginning  to  end  it  was  always  Yahweh,  and  again 
Yahweh,  who  had  chosen  and  loved  and  cared  for  them. 
It  was  He  who  had  forgiven  and  strengthened  them ;  but 
always  for  reasons  which  reached  far  beyond,  or  even 
excluded,  any  merit  on  their  part. 

The  grounds  of  Moses'  successful  intercession  for  them 
(ix.  25  ff.)  are  notable  in  this  connection.  They  have  no 
reference  at  all  to  the  needs,  or  hopes,  or  expectations  of 
the  people.  These  are  all  brushed  aside,  as  being  of  no 
moment  after  such  unfaithfulness  as  theirs  had  been. 
The  great  object  before  his  mind  is  represented  to  be 
Yahweh's  glory.  If  this  stiff-necked  people  perish,  then 
the  greatness  of  God  will  be  obscured  and  His  purposes 
will  be  misunderstood.  Men  will  certainly  think,  either 
that  Yahweh,  Israel's  God,  attempted  to  do  what  He  was 
not  able  to  do,  or  that  He  was  wroth  with  His  people, 
and  drew  them  out  into  the  wilderness  to  slay  them  there. 
It  is  God's  purpose  with  them,  God's  purpose  for  the 
world  through  them,  which  alone  gives  them  import- 
ance. Were  it  not  for  that,  they  would  be  as  little  worth 
saving  as  they  have  deserved  to  be  saved.  For  his 
people,  and,  we  may  be  sure,  for  himself,  Moses  recognises 
no  true  worth  save  in  so  far  as  he  or  they  were  useful  in 
carrying  out  Divine  purposes  of  good  to  the  world.  Nor 
is  the  absence  of  any  plea  on  Israel's  behalf,  that  it  is 
miserable  or  unhappy,  due  merely  to  a  desire  to  keep  the 
rebellious  people  in  the  background  for  the  moment,  and 
to  appeal  only  to  the  Divine  self-love  for  a  pardon  which 
would,  on  the  merits  of  the  case,  be  refused.  It  is  the 
God  of  the  whole  earth,  before  whom  *'  the  inhabitants 
of  the  earth  are  as  grasshoppers,"  who  is  appealed  to  ; 


222  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


a  God  removed  far  above  the  petty  motives  of  self- 
interested  men,  and  set  upon  the  one  great  purpose  of 
estabhshing  a  kingdom  of  God  upon  the  earth  into  which 
all  nations  might  come.  If  His  glory  is  appealed  to,  that 
is  only  because  it  is  the  glory  of  the  highest  good  both 
for  the  individual  and  for  the  world.  If  fear  lest  doubt 
should  be  cast  upon  His  power  is  put  forward  as  a  reason 
for  His  having  mercy,  that  is  because  to  doubt  His  power 
is  to  doubt  the  supremacy  of  goodness.  If  the  Divine 
promise  to  the  patriarchs  is  set  forth  here,  it  is  because 
that  promise  was  the  assurance  of  the  Divine  interest  in 
and  Divine  love  of  the  world. 

Under  such  circumstances  it  would  need  a  very  narrow- 
hearted  literalism,  such  as  only  very  "  liberal  "  theologians 
and  critics  could  favour,  to  reduce  this  appeal  to  a  mere 
attempt  to  flatter  Yahweh  into  good-humour.  It  really 
embodies  all  that  can  be  said  in  justification  of  our  looking 
for  answers  to  prayer  at  all ;  and  rightly  understood  it 
limits  the  field  of  the  answer  as  strictly  as  the  expressed 
or  implied  limitations  of  the  New  Testament,  viz.  that 
effectual  prayer  can  only  be  for  things  according  to  the 
will  of  God.  Moreover  it  expresses  an  entirely  natural 
attitude  towards  God.  Before  Him,  the  sum  of  all 
perfections,  the  loving  and  omniscient  and  •  omnipresent 
God,  what  is  man  that  he  should  assert  himself  in 
any  wise  ?  When  the  height  and  the  depth,  the 
sublimity  and  the  comprehensiveness  of  the  Divine 
purpose  is  considered,  how  can  a  man  do  aught  save  fall 
upon  his  face  in  utter  self-forgetfulness,  immeasurably 
better  even  than  self-contempt  ?  The  best  and  holiest 
of  mankind  have  always  felt  this  most ;  and  the  habit  of 
measuring  their  attainments  by  the  faithfulness  and 
knowledge,  the  virtue  and  power  which  is  in  God,  has 
impressed  some  of  the  greatest  minds  and  purest  souls 
with   such  humility,   that  to  men  without  insight  it  has 


ix.-xi.]      ISRAEL'S  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  223 

seemed  mere  affectation.  But  the  pity,  the  condescension, 
the  love  of  Christ  has  so  brought  God  down  into  our 
human  Hfe,  that  we  are  apt  at  times  to  lose  our  awe  of 
God  as  seen  in  Him.  Were  we  children  of  the  spirit  we 
should  not  fall  into  that  sin.  We  cannot,  consequently, 
be  too  frequently  or  too  sharply  recalled  to  the  more 
austere  and  remote  standpoint  of  the  Old  Testament. 
For  many  even  of  the  most  pious  it  would  be  well  if  they 
could  receive  and  keep  a  more  just  impression  of  their 
own  worthlessness  and  nullity  before  God. 

In  the  section  from  the  twelfth  verse  of  chapter  x.  to^ 
the  end  of  chapter  xi.  the  hortatory  introduction  is  summed 
up  in  a  final  review  of  all  the  motives  to  and  the  results 
of  obedience  and  love  to  God.  The  fundamental  exhor- 
tation as  to  love  to  God  is  once  more  repeated ;  only 
here  fear  is  joined  with  love  and  precedes  it ;  but  the 
necessity  of  love  to  God  is  expanded  and  dwelt  upon,  as 
at  the  beginning,  with  a  zeal  that  never  weariesj 
Deuteronomist  illustrates  and  enforces  it  with  old  reasons 
and  new,  always  speaking  with  the  same  pleading  and 
heartfelt  earnestness.  He  does  not  fear  the  tedium  of 
repetition,  nor  the  accusation  of  moving  in  a  narrow 
round  of  ideas.  Evidently  in  the  evil  time  when  he 
wrote  this  love  towards  God  had  come  to  be  his  own 
support  and  his  consolation  ;  and  it  had  been  revealed 
to  him  as  the  source  of  a  power,  a  sweetness,  and  a 
righteousness  which  could  alone  bring  the  nation  into 
communion  with  God.  In  affecting  words  resembling 
very  closely  the  noble  exhortation  in  Micah  vi.,  "  He 
hath  showed  thee,  O  man,  what  is  good  ;  and  what  doth 
Yahweh  require  of  thee,  but  to  do  justly,  and  to  love 
mercy,  and  to  walk  humbly  with  thy  God  ?  "  he  teaches 
much  the  same  doctrine  as  his  contemporary  :  "  And  now, 
Israel,  what  doth  Yahweh  thy  God  require  of  thee,  but 
to  fear  Yahweh  thy  God,  to  walk  in  all  His  ways,  and 


224  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

to  love  Him,  and  to  serve  Yahweh  thy  God  with  all  thy 
heart  and  with  all  thy  soul,  to  keep  the  commandments 
of  Yahweh  and  His  statutes  which  I  command  thee  this 
day  for  thy  good  ?  "^ 

In  spirit  these  passages  seem  identical ;  but  it  is  held 
by  many  writers  on  the  Old  Testament  that  they  are 
not  so,  that  they  represent,  in  fact,  opposite  poles  of  the 
faith  and  life  of  Israel.  Micah  is  supposed  by  Duhm,  for 
instance,  to  mean  by  his  threefold  demand  that  justice 
between  man  and  man,  love  and  kindliness  and  mercy 
towards  others,  and  humble  intercourse  with  God  are, 
in  distinction  from  sacrifice y  true  religion  and  undefiled. 
Robertson  Smith  also  considers  that  these  verses  in 
Micah  contain  a  repudiation  of  sacrifice.  In  Deuteronomy, 
on  the  contrary,  fear  and  love  of  God  and  walking  in  His 
ways  are  placed  first,  but  they  are  joined  with  a  demand 
for  the  heartfelt  service  of  God  and  the  keeping  of  His 
statutes  as  about  to  be  set  forth.  Now  these  certainly 
include  ritual  and  sacrifice.  The  one  passage,  written  by 
a  prophet,  excludes  sacrifice  as  binding  and  acceptable 
service  of  God ;  the  other,  written  perhaps  by  a  priest, 
certainly  by  a  man  upon  whom  no  prophetic  lessons  of 
the  past  had  been  lost,  includes  it.  To  use  the  words  ot 
Robertson  Smith  in  discussing  the  requisites  of  forgiveness 
in  the  Old  Testament,  "  According  to  the  prophets  Yahweh 
asks  only  a  penitent  heart  and  desires  no  sacrifice ; 
according  to  the  ritual  law,  He  desires  a  penitent  heart 
approaching  Him  in  certain  sacrificial  sacraments."^  The 
author  of  Deuteronomy  teaches  the  second  view ;  the 
author  of  Micah  chap,  vi.,  who  is  probably  his  contem- 
porary, teaches  the  former.  How  is  such  divergence 
accounted    for  ?      The    answer    generally  made    is    that 


'  Chap.  X.  12. 

^  Old  Testament  in  Jewish  Church,  2nd  edition,  p.  308. 


ix.-xi.]       ISRAELS  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  225 

Deuteronomy  was  the  product  of  a  close  alliance  between 
priests  and  prophets.  A  common  hatred  of  Manasseh's 
idolatry  and  a  common  oppression  had  brought  them 
together  as  never  perhaps  before.  With  one  heart  and 
mind  they  wrought  in  secret  for  the  better  day  which  they 
saw  approaching,  and  Deuteronomy  was  a  reissue  of  the 
ancient  Mosaic  law  adapted  to  the  prophetic  teaching. 
It  represented  a  compromise  between,  or  an  amalgama- 
tion of,  two  entirely  distinct  positions. 

But  even  on  this  view  it  would  follow  that  from  the 
time  of  Josiah,  when  Deuteronomy  was  accepted  as  the 
completest  expression  of  the  will  of  God,  the  doctrine  that 
ritual  and  sacrifice  as  well  as  penitence  were  essential 
things  in  true  religion  was  known,  and  not  only  known 
but  accepted  as  the  orthodox  opinion.  Putting  aside,  then, 
the  question  whether  sacrifice  was  acknowledged  by  the 
prophets  before  this  or  not,  they  must  have  accepted  it  from 
this  point  onward,  unless  they  denied  to  Deuteronomy 
the  authority  which  it  claimed  and  which  the  nation  con- 
ceded to  it.  Jeremiah  clearly  must  have  assented  to  it,  for 
his  style  and  his  thought  have  been  so  closely  moulded  on 
this  book  that  some  have  thought  he  may  have  been  its 
author.  In  any  case  he  did  not  repudiate  its  authority ; 
and  all  the  prophets  who  followed  him  must  have  known 
of  this  view,  and  also  that  it  had  been  sanctioned  by  that 
book  which  was  made  the  first  Jewish  Bible. 

We  have  here,  at  all  events,  the  keynote  of  the  su- 
premacy of  moral  duty  over  Divine  commands  concerning 
ritual  which  distinguishes  the  prophetic  teaching  in  Micah 
and  elsewhere,  joined  with  the  enforcement  of  ritual  obser- 
vances. But  there  are  few  purely  prophetic  passages  which 
raise  the  higher  demand  so  high  as  it  is  raised  here. 

To  love  and  fear  God  are  anew  declared  to  be  man's 
supreme  duties,  and  the  author  presses  these  home  by 
arguments  of  various    kinds.     Again    he  returns  to  the 

15 


226  THE  BOOlt  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

election  of  Israel  by  Yahweh,  without  merit  of  theirs ; 
and  to  bring  home  to  them  how  much  this  means,  the 
Deuteronomist  exhibits  the  greatness  of  their  God,  His 
might,  His  justice,  and  His  mercy,  which,  great  as  it 
is  to  His  chosen  people,  is  not  confined  to  them,  but 
extends  to  the  stranger  also.  This  most  gracious  One 
they  are  to  serve  by  deeds,  to  Him  they  are  to  cleave, 
and  they  are  to  swear  by  Him  only,  that  is,  they  are 
solemnly  to  acknowledge  Him  to  be  their  God  in  return 
for  His  undeserved  favour.  For  their  very  existence  as  a 
nation  is  a  wonder  of  His  power,  since  they  were  only 
a  handful  when  they  went  down  to  Egypt,  and  now  were 
**as  the  stars  of  heaven  for  multitude." 

Then  once  more,  in  chapter  xi.,  he  repeats  his  one 
haunting  thought  that  love  is  to  be  the  source  of  all 
worthy  fulfilment  of  the  law ;  and  he  endeavours  to  shed 
abroad  this  love  to  God  in  their  hearts  by  reminding 
them  once  more  of  all  the  marvels  of  their  deliverance 
from  Egypt,  and  of  their  wilderness  journey.  Their  God 
had  delivered  them  first,  then  chastised  them  for  their 
sins,  and  had  trained  them  for  the  new  life  that  awaited 
them  in  the  land  promised  to  their  fathers. 

Even  in  the  security  of  the  land  they  were  to  find 
themselves  not  less  dependent  upon  God  than  before. 
Rather  their  dependence  would  be  more  striking  and  more 
impressive  than  in  Egypt.  As  we  have  seen  repeatedly, 
this  inspired  writer  belonged  in  many  respects  to  the 
childhood  of  the  world,  and  the  people  he  addressed  were 
primitive  in  their  ideas.  *  Yet  his  thoughts  of  God  in  their 
highest  flight  were  so  essentially  true  and  deep,  that  even 
to-day  we  can  go  back  upon  them  for  edification  and 
inspiration.  But  here  we  have  an  appeal  based  upon  a 
distinction  which  to-day  should  have  almost  entirely  lost 
its  meaning.  The  Deuteronomist  yields  quite  simply  and 
unreservedly  to  the  feeling   that   the  regular,  unvarying 


ix.-xi.]       ISRAEL'S  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  227 

processes  of  nature  are  less  Divine,  or  at  least  are  less 
immediately  significant  of  the  Divine  presence,  than  those 
which  cannot  be  foreseen,  which  vary,   and   which  defy 
human  analysis.     For  he  here  contrasts  Egypt  and  Canaan, 
in   both  of  which   he   represents    Israel  as  having  been 
engaged  in  agricultural  pursuits,  and  speaks  as  if  in  the 
former  all  depended  upon  human  industry  and  ingenuity, 
and  might  be  counted  upon  irrespective  of  moral  conduct, 
while  in  the  latter  all  would  depend  upon  Divine  favour 
and  a  right  attitude  towards  God.     It  is  quite  true  that  in 
preceding  chapters  he   has  been  teaching  that,  even  for 
worldly  material  success,  the  higher  life  is  necessary,  that 
man    nowhere  lives    by  bread   alone ;  and  that  we   may 
assuredly  assume  is  his  deepest,  his  ultimate  thought.    But 
he  has  a  practical  end  in  view  at  this  moment.     He  wishes 
to  persuade  his  people,  and  he  appeals  to  what  both  he 
and  they  felt,  though  in  the  last  resort  it  might   hardly 
perhaps  be  justified.     In  Egypt,  he  says,  your  agricultural 
success  was   certain  if  only  you  were  industrious.     The 
great   river,    of  which  the    land  itself  is    the  gift,  came 
down  in  flood  year  after  3'ear,  and  you  had  only  to  store 
and  to  guide  its  waters  to  ensure  you  a  certain  return  for 
your  labour.     You    had   not  to  look  to  uncertain  rains, 
but  could  by  diligence  always  secure  a  sufficiency  of  the 
life-giving   element.     In    Canaan   it   will  not   be   so.     It 
'^  drinketh   water   only   of  the   rain    of  heaven."     God's 
eye  has  to  be  upon  it  continually  to  keep  it  fertile,  and 
the  sense  of  dependence  upon  Him  Vs^ill  force  itself  upon 
you    more   constantly    and    powerfully    in    consequence. 
They  could  hope  to  prosper  only  if  they  never  forgot, 
never  put  away  His  exhortations  out  of  their  sight.    Other- 
wise, he  says,  the  life-giving  showers  will  not  fall  in  their 
due  season.     Your  land  will  not  yield  its  fruits,  and  '^  ye 
shall   perish   quickly   off  the   good   land  which  Yahweh 
giveth  you." 


228  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Now  what  are  we  to  say  of  this  appeal  ?  There  can  be 
no  doubt  that  the  Divine  omnipotence  was  really,  in  the 
Deuteronomist's  view  as  well  as  in  ours,  as  irresistible  in 
Egypt  as  in  Canaan.  Fundamentally,  no  doubt,  life  or 
death,  prosperity  or  adversity,  were  as  much  in  the  hand 
of  God  in  the  one  case  as  in  the  other ;  and  the  Deutero- 
nomist,  at  least,  had  no  doubt  that  rebellion  against  God 
could  and  would  destroy  Egypt's  prosperity  as  much  as 
Canaan's.  But  he  felt  that  somehow  there  was  a  tenderer 
and  more  intimate  communion  of  love  between  Yahweh 
and  His  people  under  the  one  set  of  circumstances  than 
under  the  other.  We  are  not  entitled  to  impute  to  him  a 
questionable  distinction  which  modern  minds  are  apt  to 
make,  viz.  that  where  long  experience  has  taught  men  to 
regard  the  course  of  providence  as  fixed,  there  the  sphere 
of  prayer  for  material  benefit  ends,  and  that  only  in  the 
region  v;here  the  Divine  action  in  nature  seems  to  us 
more  spontaneous,  and  less  capable  of  being  foreseen, 
can  prayer  be  heartily,  because  hopefully,  made.  But 
the  feeling  that  suggests  that  v^^as  certainly  in  his  mind. 
He  felt  the  difference  between  the  fixed  conditions  of  life 
in  Egypt  and  the  more  variable  conditions  in  Canaan,  to 
be  much  the  same  as  the  difference  between  the  circum- 
stances of  a  son  receiving  a  fixed  yearly  allowance  from 
his  father,  in  an  independent  and  perhaps  distant  home, 
and  those  of  a  son  in  his  father's  house,  who  receives  his 
portion  day  by  day  as  the  result  and  evidence  of  an  ever- 
present  affection.  Both  are  equally  dependent  upon  the 
father's  love,  and  both  should  theoretically  be  equally 
filled  with  loving  gratitude.  But  as  a  fact,  the  latter 
would  be  more  likely  to  be  so,  and  would  be  held  more 
guilty  if  he  were  not  so.  Upon  that  actual  fact  the 
Deuteronomist  takes  his  stand.  As  they  were  now  to 
enter  into  Yahweh's  land.  His  chosen  dwelling-place,  he 
sees   in    the    different    material    conditions   of   the    new 


ix.-xi.]       ISRAEL'S  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  229 

country  that  which  should  make  the  union  between 
Yahweh  and  His  people  more  intimate  and  more  secure, 
and  He  presses  home  upon  them  the  greater  shame  of 
ingratitude,  if  under  such  circumstances  they  should 
forget  God  and  His  laws. 

Finally  (xi.  22-25)  he  promises  them  the  victorious 
extension  of  their  dominion  if  they  will  love  Yahweh  and 
keep  His  laws.  From  Lebanon  to  the  southern  wilderness, 
from  the  Euphrates  to  the  western  sea,  they  should  rule, 
if  they  would  cleave  unto  their  God.  At  no  time  was 
this  promise  fulfilled  save  in  the  days  of  David  and 
Solomon.  For  only  then  had  Lebanon  and  the  wilderness, 
the  Euphrates  and  the  sea,  been  the  boundaries  of  Israel. 
This  must,  then,  be  regarded  as  the  time  of  Israel's 
greatest  faithfulness.  But  it  is  striking  that  it  is  in 
Josiah's  day,  after  the  adoption  of  Deuteronomy  as  the 
national  law,  that  we  meet  with  a  conscious  effort  to 
realise  this  condition  of  things  once  more.  There  would 
seem  to  be  little  doubt  that  the  good  king  took  an  equally 
literal  view  of  what  the  book  commanded  and  of  what  it 
promised.  He  inaugurated  a  period  of  complete  external 
compliance  with  the  law,  and  like  the  young  and  inex- 
perienced man  he  was,  he  regarded  that  as  the  fulfilment 
of  its  requirements,  and  looked  for  a  similar  instantaneous 
fulfilment  of  the  promises.  Bit  by  bit  he  had  absorbed 
the  ancient  territory  of  the  Northern  Kingdom ;  and  in  the 
decay  of  the  Assyrian  power  he  saw  the  opportunity  for 
the  enlargement  of  his  dominion  to  the  limit  here  defined. 
He  consequently  went  out  against  Pharaoh  Necho  in  the 
full  confidence  that  he  would  be  victorious.  But  if  the 
Divine  promise  and  its  conditions  were  taken  up  too 
superficially  by  him.  Divine  providence  soon  and  terribly 
corrected  the  error.  The  defeat  and  death  of  Josiah 
revealed  that  the  reformation  had  not  been  real  and  deep 
enough,  and  that  the  nation  was  not  faithful  enough  to 


230  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

make  such  triumph  possible.  Indeed,  so  far  as  we  can 
see,  the  time  for  any  true  fulfilment  of  Israel's  calling 
in  that  fashion  had  then  passed  by.  The  harvest  was 
past,  and  Israel  was  not  saved,  and  could  not  now  be 
saved,  for  it  was  in  its  deepest  heart  unfaithful. 

It  may  be  questioned  by  some,  of  course,  whether  an 
Israel  faithful  even  in  the  highest  degree  could  at  any 
time  have  kept  possession  of  so  wide  a  dominion  in  the 
face  of  the  great  empires  of  Assyria  and  Egypt.  These 
were  rich,  and  had  a  far  larger  command  both  of  territory 
and  men  :  how  then  could  the  Israelites  ever  have  main- 
tained themselves  in  face  of  them  ?  But  the  question 
is  how  to  measure  the  power  of  the  higher  ideas  they 
held.  It  is  not  force  but  truth  that  rules  the  world ;  and 
absolutely  no  limit  can  be  set  to  the  possibilities  which 
open  out  to  a  free,  morally  robust,  and  faithful  people, 
who  have  become  possessed  of  higher  spiritual  ideas 
than  the  peoples  that  surround  them.  Even  in  this 
sceptical  modern  day  the  transformation  as  regards 
physical  strength  which  takes  place  when  certain  classes 
of  Hindus  become  either  Mohammedans  or  Chris- 
tians is  so  startling  and  so  rapid  that  it  appears  almost 
a  miracle.  As  regards  courage,  too,  it  is  even  more 
rapid  and  equally  remarkable.  The  great  majority  of 
the  struggles  of  nations  are  fought  out  on  the  level 
of  mere  physical  force  and  for  material  ends,  and  the 
strongest  and  richest  wins  :  but  whenever  a  people  pos- 
sessed of  higher  ideas  and  absolutely  faithful  to  them 
does  appear,  the  opposing  power,  however  great  it  may 
be  in  wealth  and  numbers,  is  whirled  away  in  fragments 
as  by  a  tornado,  or  it  dissolves  like  ice  before  the  sun. 
What  Israel  might  have  been,  therefore,  had  it  been 
penetrated  by  the  principles  of  the  higher  religion,  and 
been  passionately  true  to  it,  can  in  no  way  be  judged 
by    that   which    it   actually   was.      Among    the    untried 


ix.-xi.]       ISRAEL'S  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  231 


possibilities  which  it  was  too  unfaithful  to  realise,  the 
possession  of  such  an  empire  as  Deuteronomy  promises 
would  seem  to  be  one  of  the  least. 

Our  chapter  sums  up  what  precedes  with  the  declara- 
tion on  the  part  of  Yahweh,  "  See,  I  am  setting  before  you 
this  day  a  blessing  and  a  curse,"  according  as  they  might 
obey  or  disobey  the  Divine  command.  It  is  stated,  in 
short,  that  the  whole  future  of  the  people  is  to  be  deter- 
mined by  their  attitude  to  Yahweh  and  the  commands  He 
has  given  them.  In  these  two  words  "  blessing "  and 
*'  curse,"  as  Dillmann  observes,  He  sets  before  them  the 
greatness  of  the  decision  they  are  called  upon  to  make. 
Just  as  at  the  end  of  chapter  iii.  the  vision  of  Yahweh's 
stretched-out  hand,  which  has  strewn  the  world  with  the 
wrecks  and  fragments  of  destroyed  nations,  is  relied  on 
to  prepare  the  people  for  contemplating  their  own  calling, 
so  here  the  gain  or  loss  which  would  follow  their  decision 
is  solemnly  set  before  them.  By  Dillmann  and  others 
it  is  supposed  that  vv.  29  and  31,  which  instruct  the 
people  to  "  lay  the  blessing  upon  Mount  Gerizim  and  the 
curse  upon  Mount  Ebal,"  have  been  transferred  by  the 
later  editor  from  chapter  xxvii.,  where  they  would  come 
in  very  fittingly  after  ver.  3.  But  whether  that  be  so  or 
not,  they  are  evidently  so  far  in  place  here  that  they  add 
to  the  solemnity  with  which  the  fate  of  the  nation  in  the 
future  is  insisted  upon.  Their  "  choice  is  brief  and  yet 
endless " ;  it  can  be  made  in  a  moment,  but  in  its  con- 
sequence it  will  endure. 

But  here  a  difficulty  arises.  Dr.  Driver  in  his  Intro- 
duction says  of  this  hortatory  section  of  our  book  that  its 
teaching  is  that  "  duties  are  not  to  be  performed  from 
secondary  motives,  such  as  fear  or  dread  of  consequences  ; 
they  are  to  be  the  spontaneous  outcome  of  a  heart  from 
which  every  taint  of  worldliness  has  been  removed,  and 
which  is  penetrated  by  an  all-absorbing  sense  of  personal 


2-2  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


devotion  to  God."  Yet  in  these  later  chapters  we  have 
had  httle  else  but  appeals  to  the  gratitude  and  hopes  and 
fears  of  Israel.  Chapters  viii.  to  xi.  are  wholly  taken  up 
with  incitements  to  love  and  obey  God,  because  He  has 
been  immeasurably  good  to  them,  never  letting  their 
ingratitude  overcome  His  lovingkindness ;  because  they 
are  wholly  dependent  upon  Him  for  prosperity  and  the 
fertility  of  their  land;  and  because  evil  will  come  upon 
them  if  they  do  not.  That  would  seem  to  be  the  opposite 
of  what  Driver  has  declared  to  be  the  informing  spirit 
and  the  fundamental  teaching  of  Deuteronomy. 

Yet  his  view  is  the  true  one.     Even  if  the  Deuteronomist 
had  added  these  lower  motives  to  attract  and  gain  over 
those  who  were  not  so  open  to  the  higher,  that  would  not 
deprive  him  of  the  glory  of  having  set  forth  disinterested 
love  as  the  really  impelling  power  in  true  religion.     We 
are  not  required  to  lower  our  esteem  of  that  achievement, 
even  if,  like  the  reasonable  and  wise  teacher  he  is,  he 
boldly  uses  every  motive  that  actually   influences  men, 
whether  it  should  do  so  or  not,  to  win  them  to  the  higher 
life.     But  it  is  not  necessary  to  suppose  that  he  does  so. 
His  demand  is  that   men   shall   love  Yahweh  their   God 
with   all    their  heart  and    strength,  and   to  win  them  to 
that  he  sets  forth  what  their  God  has  revealed  Himself 
to  be.     Men  cannot  love  one  whom  they  do  not  know ; 
they  cannot  love  one  who  has  not  proved  himself  lovable 
to  them.     As  his  whole  effort  is  to  get  men  to  love  God, 
and  show  their  love  by  obedience  to  His  expressed  will, 
the  Deuteronomist  brings  to  mind  all  His  loving  thoughts 
and  acts  towards  them,  and  so  continually  keeps  his  appeal 
at  the  highest  level.     He  does  not  ask  men  to  serve  God 
because  it  will    be  profitable   to   them,   but  because  they 
love  God  ;  and  he  endeavours  to  make  them  love  God  by 
reciting  all  His  love  and  friendliness  and  patience  to  His 
people,  and  by  pointing  out   the  evil  which  His  love  is 


ix.-xi.]       ISRAEL'S  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  233 

seeking  to  ward  off.  The  plea  is  not  the  ignoble  one  that 
they  must  serve  Yahweh  for  what  they  can  gain  by  it,  but 
that  they  should  love  Yahweh  for  His  love  and  gracious- 
ness,  and  that  out  of  this  love  continual  obedience  should 
flow  as  a  necessary  result.  That  is  his  central  position  ; 
and  if  he  points  out  the  necessary  results  of  a  refusal  to 
turn  to  God  in  this  way,  he  does  not  thereby  set  forth 
slavish  fear  or  calculating  prudence  as  in  themselves 
religious  motives.  They  are  only  natural  and  reasonable 
means  of  turning  men  to  view  the  other  side.  He  uses 
them  to  bring  the  people  to  a  pause,  during  which  he 
may  win  them  by  the  love  of  God.  That  is  always 
the  true  appeal ;  and  Christianity  when  it  is  at  its  finest 
can  do  nothing  but  follow  in  this  path.  Having  before 
his  mind  the  results  of  evil  conduct,  he  does  urge  men  to 
escape  from  the  wrath  that  may  rest  upon  them.  But  the 
only  means  so  to  escape  is  to  yield  to  the  love  of  God. 
No  self-restraint  dictated  by  fear  of  consequences,  no 
turning  from  evil  because  of  the  lions  that  are  seen  in 
the  path,  satisfies  the  demand  of  either  Old  Testament 
or  Nev/  Testament  religion.  Both  raise  the  truly 
religious  life  above  that  into  the  region  of  self-devoting 
love ;  and  they  both  deny  spiritual  validity  to  all  acts, 
however  good  they  may  be  in  themselves,  which  do 
not  follow  love  as  its  free  and  uncalculating  expression. 
Yet  they  both  deal  with  men  as  rational  beings  who  can 
estimate  the  results  of  their  acts,  and  warn  them  of  the 
death  which  must  be  the  end  of  every  other  way  of 
supposed  salvation.  In  this  manner  they  keep  the  path 
between  extremes,  ignoring  neither  the  inner  heart  of 
religion  nor  winding  themselves  too  high  for  sinful  men. 
How  hard  it  is  to  keep  to  this  reasonable  but  spiritual 
view  is  seen  by  popular  aberrations  both  within  and 
without  the  Church.  At  times  in  the  history  of  the 
Church  Christian  teachers   have  allowed  their  minds  to 


234  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

be  SO  dominated  by  the  terror  of  judgment  that  judgment 
has  seemed  to  the  world  to  be  the  sole  burden  of  their 
message.  As  a  reaction  from  that  again,  other  teachers 
have  arisen  who  put  forward  the  love  of  God  in  such 
a  one-sided  way  as  to  empty  it  of  all  its  severe  but 
glorious  sublimity  ;  as  if,  like  Mohammed,  they  believed 
God  was  minded  mainly  "  to  make  religion  easy "  unto 
men.  Outside  the  Church  the  same  discord  prevails. 
Some  secular  writers  praise  those  religions  which  declare 
that  a  man's  fate  is  decided  at  the  judgment  by  the  balance 
of  merit  over  demerit  in  his  acts ;  while  others  mock  at 
any  judgment,  and  commit  themselves  with  a  light^  heart 
to  the  half-amused  tolerance  of  the  Divine  good-nature. 
But  the  teaching  which  combines  both  elements  can  alone 
sustain  and  bear  up  a  worthy  spiritual  life.  To  rely  upon 
terror  only,  is  to  ignore  the  very  essence  of  true  religion 
and  the  better  elements  in  the  nature  of  man  ;  for  that  will 
not  be  dominated  by  fear  alone.  To  think  of  the  Divine 
love  as  a  lazy,  self-indulgent  laxity,  is  to  degrade  the 
Divine  nature,  and  to  forget  that  the  possibility  of  wrath 
is  bound  up  in  all  love  that  is  worthy  of  the  name. 

One  other  point  is  worthy  of  remark.  In  these  chapters, 
which  deal  with  the  history  of  God's  chosen  people  in 
their  relations  with  Him,  there  come  out  the  very  elements 
which  distinguish  the  personal  religion  of  St.  Paul.  The 
beginning  and  end  of  it  all  is  the  free  grace  of  God.  God 
elected  His  people  that  they  might  be  His  instrument  for 
blessing  the  world,  not  because  of  any  goodness  in  them, 
for  they  were  perverse  and  rebellious,  but  because  He 
had  so  determined  and  had  promised  to  the  fathers.  He 
had  delivered  them  from  the  bondage  of  Egypt  by  His 
mighty  power,  and  dwelt  among  them  thenceforth  as 
among  no  other  people.  He  gave  them  a  land  to  dwell 
in,  and  there  as  in  His  own  house  He  watched  and  tended 
them^  and  strove  to  lead  them  upwards  to  the  height  of 


ix.-xi.]       ISRAEL'S  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  235 

their  calling  as  the  people  of  God  by  demanding  of  them 
faith  and  love.  It  is  a  very  enlightening  remark  of 
Robertson  Smith's  that  the  deliverance  out  of  Egypt  was 
to  Israel  in  the  Old  Testament  what  conversion  is  to 
the  individual  Christian  according  to  the  New  Testament. 
Taking  that  as  our  starting-point,  we  see  that  the  thought 
of  Deuteronomy  is  precisely  the  thought  of  Romans.  It 
is  said,  and  truly  enough,  that  the  Pauline  theology  was 
a  direct  transcript  of  Paul's  own  experience ;  but  we  see 
from  this  that  he  did  not  need  to  form  the  moulds  for  his 
own  fundamental  thoughts.  Long  before  him  the  author 
of  Deuteronomy  had  formed  these,  and  the}'-  must  have 
been  familiar  to  every  instructed  Jew.  But  the  recog- 
nition of  this  is  not  a  loss  but  a  gain.  If  St.  Paul  had 
founded  a  theory  of  the  universal  action  of  God  upon  the 
soul  only  on  the  grounds  of  his  own  very  peculiar  experi- 
ence, it  might  be  argued  that  the  basis  of  his  teaching  had 
been  too  personal  to  permit  us  to  feel  sure  that  his  view 
was  really  as  exhaustive  as  he  thought.  V/e  see,  how- 
ever, that  what  he  experienced  the  Deuteronomist  had 
long  before  traced  in  the  history  of  his  people ;  and  most 
probably  he  would  not  have  traced  it  with  so  firm  a  hand 
had  he  not  himself  had  experience  of  a  similar  kind  in  his 
personal  relations  with  God.  This  method  of  conceiving 
the  relation  of  God  to  the  higher  life  of  man,  therefore,  is 
stated  by  the  Scriptures  as  normal.  The  free  grace  of  God 
is  the  source  and  the  sustainer  01  all  spiritual  life,  whether 
in  individuals  or  communities.  Ultimately,  behind  all  the 
successful  or  unsuccessful  efforts  of  the  human  heart  and 
will,  we  are  taught  to  see  the  great  Giver,  waiting  to  be 
gracious,  willing  that  all  men  should  be  saved,  but  acting 
with  the  strangest  reserves  and  limitations,  choosing  Israel 
among  the  nations,  and  even  within  Israel  choosing  the 
Israel  in  whom  alone  the  promises  can  be  realised.  Made 
to  serve  by  human  sin,  He  waits  upon  the  caprices  of  the 


2  36  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

wills  He  has  created.  He  does  not  force  them ;  but  with 
compassionate  patience  He  builds  up  His  Holy  Temple 
of  such  living  stones  as  offer  themselves,  and  ''  without 
haste  as  without  rest  "  prepares  for  the  consummation  of 
His  work  in  the  redemption  of  a  people  that  shall  be  all 
prophets,  a  kingdom  of  priests,  a  holy  nation  unto  whom 
all  nations  shall  join  themselves  when  they  see  that  God 
is  in  them  of  a  truth.  That  is  the  Old  Testament  concep- 
tion of  the  source,  and  guarantee,  and  goal  of  all  spiritual 
life  in  the  world,  and  St.  Paul's  view  is  merely  a  more 
mature  and  definite  form  of  the  same  thing.  And  wherever 
spiritual  life  has  manifested  itself  with  unusual  power,  the 
same  consciousness  of  utter  unworthiness  on  the  part  of 
man,  and  entire  dependence  upon  the  grace  and  favour 
of  God,  has  also  manifested  itself  The  intellectual  diffi- 
culties connected  with  this  view,  great  as  they  are,  have 
never  suppressed  it ;  the  pride  of  man  and  his  faith  in 
himself  have  not  been  able  permanently  to  obscure  it. 
The  greater  men  are,  the  more  entirely  do  they  dread 
any  approach  to  that  self-exaltation  which  puts  away  as 
unnecessary  the  Divine  hand  stretched  out  to  them.  As 
Dean  Church  points  out,^  "  not  Hebrew  prophets  only, 
but  the  heathen  poets  of  Greece  looked  with  peculiar  and 
profound  alarm  upon  the  haughty  self-sufficiency  of  men." 
Nothing  can,  they  think,  ward  off  evil  from  the  man  who 
makes  the  mistake  of  supposing,  even  when  carrying  out 
the  Divine  will,  that  he  needs  only  his  own  strength  of 
brain  and  will  and  arm  to  succeed,  that  he  is  accountable 
to  no  one  for  the  character  which  he  permits  success  to 
build  up  within  him. 

Even  the  agnostic  of  to-day,  as  represented  by  Professor 
Huxley,  cannot  do  without  some  modicum  of  "grace"  in 
his  conception  of  man's  relation  to  the  powers  of  nature, 

'  Cathedral  Scnnons,  p,  26. 


ix.-xi.]       ISRAELS  MOTIVES  FOR  FAITHFULNESS  237 

though  to  admit  this   is    to    run  a   rift  of  inconsistency 
through    his  whole    system  of  thought.     "  Suppose,"   he 
says  in  his  Lay  Sermons,  ''  it  were  perfectly  certain  that 
the  life  and  future  of  every  one  of  us  would,  one  day  or 
other,   depend  on  his  winning  or  losing  a  game  at  chess. 
.   .  .  The  chessboard    is    the  world,    the    pieces    are    the 
phenomena  of  the  universe,  the  rules    of  the  game  are 
what   we  call  the    laws  of  nature.     The    player   on    the 
other  side  is  hidden  from  us.     We   know  that  his  play 
is  always  fair,  just,   patient.     But  we  know  to  our  cost 
that  he  never  overlooks  a  mistake,  or  makes  the  smallest 
allowance  for   ignorance.     To   the   man    who   plays  well 
the     highest     stakes    are     paid    with     that     overflowing 
generosity    with     which    the    strong    shows    delight    in 
strength,  and  one  who   plays  ill  is  checkmated   without 
haste,   but   without    remorse.     My  metaphor  will  remind 
you  of  the  famous  picture  in  which  the  Evil  One  is  depicted 
playing  a  game  of  chess  with  man  for  his  soul.     Substitute 
for  the  mocking  fiend  in  that  picture  a  calm,  strong  angel, 
playing,  as  we  say,  for  love,  and  who  would  rather  lose 
than  win,  and  I  should  accept  it  as  the  image  of  human 
life."     Even  in  a  world  without  God,  therefore,  the  facts 
of  life   suggest   "justice,"   "patience,"  "generosity,"    and 
a  pity  which  "would  rather  lose  than  win."     With  all  the 
inexorable  rigour  and  hardness  of  man's  lot  there  is  mingled 
something  that  suggests  "  grace  "  in  the  power  that  rules 
the  world ;  and  from  the  Deuteronomist  to  St.  Paul,  from 
Augustine  to  Calvin  and  Professor  Huxley,  the  resolutely 
thorough  thinkers  have  found,  in  the  last  analysis,  these 
two  elements,  the  rigour  of  law  and  the  election  of  grace, 
working  together  in  the  moulding  of  mankind. 

The  statement  of  these  facts  in  Deuteronomy  is  as 
thorough  as  any  that  succeeded  it.  The  rigour  of  law 
could  not  be  more  precisely  and  pathetically  declared  than 
in    this   insistence   on   the    blessing   or   the  curse  which 


238  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

must  inevitably  follow  right  choice  or  wrong.  But  the 
tenderness  of  grace  could  not  be  more  attractively 
displayed  than  in  this  picture  of  Yahweh's  dealings  with 
Israel.  Love  never  faileth  here,  no  more  than  elsewhere. 
It  persists,  notwithstanding  stiff-necked  rebellion,  and  in 
spite  of  coarse  materialism  of  nature.  Even  a  childish 
fickleness,  more  utterly  trying  than  any  other  weakness 
or  defect,  cannot  wear  it  out.  But  inexorable  blessing 
or  curse  is  blended  with  it,  and  helps  to  work  out  the 
final  result  for  Israel  and  mankind.  That  is  the  manner 
of  the  government  of  God,  according  to  the  Scriptures. 
History  in  its  long  course  as  known  to  us  now  confirms 
the  view ;  and  the  author  of  Deuteronomy,  in  thus  blending 
love  and  law  together  in  the  end  of  this  great  exhortation, 
has  rested  the  obligation  to  obedience  on  a  foundation 
which  cannot  be  moved. 


CHAPTER   XIII 

LAW  AND  RELIGION 
Deut.  xii.-xxvi. 

WITH  this  section  (chapters  xii. — xxvi.)  we  have  at 
length  reached  the  legislation  to  which  all  that  has 
gone  before  is,  in  form  at  least,  a  prelude.  But  in  its  general 
outline  this  code,  if  it  can  be  so  called,  has  a  very  unex- 
pected character.  When  we  speak  of  a  code  of  laws  in 
modern  days,  what  we  mean  is  a  series  of  statutes,  carefully 
arranged  under  suitable  heads,  dealing  with  the  rights 
and  duties  of  the  people,  and  providing  remedies  for  all 
possible  wrongs.  Then  behind  these  laws  there  is  the 
executive  power  of  the  Government,  pledged  to  enforce 
them,  and  ready  to  punish  any  breaches  of  them  which 
may  be  committed.  In  most  cases,  too,  definite  penalties 
are  appointed  for  any  disregard  or  transgression  of  them. 
Each  word  has  been  carefully  selected,  and  it  is  under- 
stood that  the  very  letter  of  the  laws  is  to  be  binding. 
Every  one  tried  by  them  knows  that  the  exact  terms  of 
the  laws  are  to  be  pressed  against  him,  and  that  the  thing 
aimed  at  is  a  rigorous,  literal  enforcement  of  every  detail 
Tried  by  such  a  conception,  this  Deuteronomic  legislation 
looks  very  extraordinary  and  unintelligible. 

In  the  first  place,  there  is  very  little  of  orderly  sequence 
in  it.  Some  large  sections  of  it  have  a  consecutive  cha- 
racter ;  but  there  is  no  perceptible  order  in  the  succession 
of  these  sections,  and  there  has  been  very  little  attempt 

239 


240  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

to  group    the    individual    precepts    under   related    heads. 
Moreover   in    many  sections    there    is    no    mention   of  a 
penalty  for  disobedience,  nor  is  there  any  machinery  for 
enforcing  the   prescriptions  of  the  code.     There  is,  too, 
much  in  it  that  seems  rather  to  be  good  advice,  or  direction 
for  leading  a  righteous  life,  a  life  becoming  an  Israelite 
and  a  servant  of  Yahweh,  than  law.     For  instance,  such 
a   prescription   as  this,  "  If  there    be  with   thee   a  poor 
man,  one  of  thy  brethren,  within  any  of  thy  gates,  in  thy 
land  which  Yahweh  thy  God  giveth  thee,  thou  shalt  not 
harden   thine  heart  nor   shut  thine   hand   from  thy  poor 
brother,"  can  in  no  sense  be  treated  as  a  law,  in  the  hard 
technical  sense  of  that  word.     It  stands  exactly  on  a  level 
with  the  exhortations  of  the   New  Testament,  e.g.   '*  Be 
not  wise  in  your  own  conceits,"  "  Render  to  no  man  evil 
for  evil,"  and  rather  sets  up  an  ideal  of  conduct  which  is 
to  be  striven  after  than  establishes  a  law  which  must  be 
complied  with.     There   is   no  punishment  prescribed  for 
disobedience.     All   that  follows  if  a  man   do   harden  his 
heart  against  his  poor  brother  is  the  sting  of  conscience, 
which  brings  home  to  him  that  he  is  not  living  according 
to  the  will   of  God.     In  almost  every  respect,  therefore, 
this  Deuteronomic  code  differs  from  a  modern  code,  and 
in  dealing  with  it  we  must  largely  dismiss  the  ideas  which 
naturally  occur  to  us  when  we  speak  of  a  code  of  laws. 
Our  conception   of  that   is,   clearly,   not  valid   for   these 
ancient  codes ;  and  we  need  not  be  surprised  if  we  find 
that  they  will  not  bear  being  pressed  home  in  all  their 
details,  as  modern  codes  must  be,  and  are  meant  to  be. 
Great  practical  difficulties  have  arisen  in  India,  Sir  Henry 
JMaine  assures  us,  from  applying  the  ideas   of  Western 
lawyers  to  the  ancient  and  sacred  codes  of  the  East.     He 
says  that  the  effect  of  a  procedure   under  which  all  the 
disputes  of  a  community  must  be  referred  to  regular  law- 
courts  is  to  stereotype  ascertained   usages,   and  to  treat 


xii.-xxvi.]  LAW  AND  RELIGION  241 

the  oracular  precepts  of  a  sacred  book  as  texts  and  pre- 
cedents that  must  be  enforced.  The  consequence  is  that 
vague  and  elastic  social  ordinances,  which  have  hitherto 
varied  according  to  the  needs  of  the  people,  become  fixed 
and  immutable,  and  an  Asiatic  society  finds  itself  arrested 
and,  so  to  speak,  imprisoned  unexpectedly  within  its  own 
formulas.  Inconsistencies  and  contradictions,  which  were 
never  perceived  when  these  laws  were  worked  by  Easterns, 
who  had  a  kind  of  instinctive  perception  of  their  true 
nature,  became  glaring  and  troublesome  under  Western 
rule,  and  much  unintentional  wrong  has  resulted.  May 
it  not  be  that  the  same  thing  has  happened  in  the  domain 
of  literature  in  connection  with  these  ancient  Hebrew 
laws?  Discrepancies,  small  and  great,  have  been  the 
commonplace  of  Pentateuch  criticism  for  many  years  past, 
and  on  them  very  far-reaching  theories  have  been  built. 
It  may  easily  be  that  some  of  these  are  the  result  rather 
of  our  failure  to  take  into  account  the  elastic  nature  of 
Asiatic  law,  and  that  a  less  strained  application  of  modern 
notions  would  have  led  to  a  more  reasonable  interpretation. 
But  granting  that  ordinary  ancient  law  is  not  to  be  taken 
in  our  rigorous  modern  sense,  yet  the  fact  that  what  we 
are  dealing  with  here  is  Divine  law  may  seem  to  some  to 
imply  that  in  all  its  details  it  was  meant  to  be  fulfilled 
to  the  letter.  If  not,  then  in  what  sense  is  it  inspired, 
and  how  can  we  be  justified  in  regarding  it  as  Divinely 
given  ?  The  reply  to  that  is,  of  course,  simply  this,  that 
inspiration  makes  free  use  of  all  forms  of  expression  which 
are  common  and  permissible  at  the  time  and  place  at 
which  it  utters  itself.  From  all  we  know  of  the  Divine 
methods  of  acting  in  the  world,  we  have  no  right  to 
suppose  that  in  giving  inspired  laws  God  would  create 
entirely  new  and  different  forms  for  Himself.  On  the 
contrary,  legislation  in  ancient  Israel,  though  Divine  in 
its   source,   would   naturall^__takg:_the  ordinary  forms   of 


16 


242  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


ancient  law.  Moreover  in  this  case  it  could  hardly  have 
been  otherwise.  As  has  already  been  pointed  out,  a  large 
part  ot  the  Mosaic  legislation  must  have  been  adopted 
from  the  customs  of  the  various  tribes  who  were  welded 
into  one  by  Moses.  It  cannot  be  conceived  that  the  laws 
against  stealing,  for  example,  the  penalties  for  murder,  or 
the  prescriptions  for  sacrifice,  can  have  been  first  intro- 
duced by  the  great  Lawgiver.  He  made  much  ancient 
customary  law  to  be  part  and  parcel  of  the  Yahwistic 
legislation  by  simply  taking  it  over.  If  so,  then  all  that 
he  added  would  naturally,  as  to  form,  be  moulded  on 
what  he  found  pre-existing.  Consequently  we  may  apply 
to  this  law,  whether  Divinely  revealed  or  adopted,  the 
same  tests  and  methods  of  interpretation  as  we  should 
apply  to  any  other  body  of  ancient  Eastern  law. 

Now  of  ancient  Eastern  codes  the  laws  of  Manu  are  the 
nearest  approach  to  the  Mosaic  codes,  and  their  character 
is  thus  stated  by  themselves  (chap,  i.,  ver.  107)  :  ''In  this 
work  the  sacred  law  has  been  fully  stated,  as  well  as  the 
good  and  bad  qualities  of  human  actions  and  the  imme- 
morial rule  of  conduct  to  be  followed  by  all."  That  means 
that  in  the  code  are  to  be  found  ritual  laws,  general  moral 
precepts,  and  a  large  infusion  of  immemorial  customs.  And 
its  history,  as  elicited  by  criticism,  has  very  interesting 
hints  to  give  us  as  to  the  probable  course  of  legal  develop- 
ment in  primitive  nations.  It  is  sometimes  said  that  the 
results  of  the  criticism  of  the  Old  Testament,  if  true, 
present  us  with  a  literature  which  has  gone  through 
vicissitudes  and  editorial  processes  for  which  literary 
history  elsewhere  affords  absolutely  no  parallel.  However 
that  may  be  as  regards  the  historical  and  prophetical 
books,  it  is  not  true  with  regard  to  the  legal  portions  of 
the  Pentateuch.  The  very  same  processes  are  followed  in 
Professor  Buhler's  Introduction  to  his  translation  of  the 
Lows  of  Manu,  forming  Vol.  XXV.  of  The  Sacred  Books 


xii.-xxvi.]  LAW  AND   RELIGION  243 

of  the  East,  as  are  followed  in  the  critical  commentaries 
on  the  Old  Testament  law  codes.  Pages  Ixvii.  seq.  of 
Buhler's  Introduction  read  exactly  like  an  extract  from 
Kuenen  or  Dillmann  ;  and  the  analysis  of  the  text,  with 
its  resultant  list  of  interpolations,  runs  as  much  into  detail 
as  any  similar  analysis  in  the  Old  Testament  can  do. 
Moreover  the  conjectures  as  to  the  growth  of  Manu's  code 
are,  in  many  places,  parallel  to  the  critical  theories  of  the 
growth  of  the  Mosaic  codes.  The  foundation  of  Manu  is, 
in  the  last  resort,  threefold — the  teaching  of  the  Vedas,  the 
decisions  of  those  acquainted  with  the  law,  and  the  customs 
of  virtuous  Aryas.  At  a  later  time  the  teachers  of  the 
Vedic  schools  gathered  up  the  more  important  of  these 
precepts,  decisions,  and  customs  into  manuals  for  the  use 
of  their  pupils,  written  at  first  in  aphoristic  prose,  and  later 
in  verse.  These,  however,  were  not  systematic  codes  at 
all.  As  the  name  given  them  implies,  they  were  strings 
of  maxims  or  aphorisms.  Later,  these  were  set  forth  as 
binding  upon  all,  and  were  revised  into  the  form  of  which 
the  Laws  of  Manu  is  the  finest  specimen. 

In  Israel  the  process  would  appear  to  have  been  similar, 
though  much  simpler.  It  was  similar ;  for  though  there 
are  radical  differences  between  the  Aryan  and  the  Semitic 
mind  which  must  not  be  overlooked,  the  former  being 
more  systematic  and  fond  of  logical  arrangement  than  the 
latter,  a  great  many  of  the  things  which  are  common  to 
Moses  and  Manu  are  quite  independent  of  race,  and  are 
due  to  the  fact  that  both  legislations  were  to  regulate  the 
lives  of  men  at  the  same  stage  of  social  advancement. 
But  Manu  was  much  later  than  Moses.  Indeed,  as  we 
now  have  them,  the  laws  ot  Manu  are  as  late  as  the  post- 
Ezraite  Judaic  code,  and  in  temper  and  tone  these  two 
codes  very  nearly  resemble  each  other.  Consequently  the 
earlier  codes  of  the  Pentateuch  are  simpler  than  Manu. 
When  Israel  left  Egypt,  custom  must  have  been  almost 


244  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

alone  the  guide  of  life.      Moses'  task  was  to  promulgate 
and  force    home  his  fundamental    truths ;  in  this  view  he 
must  adopt  and  remodel  the  customary  law  so  as  to  make  it 
innocuous  to  the  higher  principles  he  introduced,  or  even 
to  make  it  a  vehicle  for  the  popularising  of  them.     So  far 
as  he  made  codes,  he  would  make  them  with  that  end. 
Consequently  he  would  take  up   mainly  such  prominent 
points  as  were    most   capable  of  being,   or  which    most 
urgently  needed  to  be,  moralised,  leaving  all  the  rest  to 
custom  where  it  was  harmless.     This  is  the  reason,  too, 
most  probably,  why  the  earlier  codes  are  so  short  and  so 
unsystematic.     They  are  selections  which  needed  special 
attention,  not  complete  codes  covering  the  whole  of  life. 
In  fact  the  form  and  contents  of  all  the  Old  Testament 
codes  can  be  accounted  for  only  on  this  supposition.     As 
the  codes  lengthen,  they  do  so  simply  by  taking  up,  in  a 
modified  or  unmodified  form,  so  much  more  of  the  custom ; 
and  under  the  pressure  of  Yahwistic  ideas  these  selected 
codes   became    more    and    more    weighted   with   spiritual 
significance  and  power. 

That  would  seem  to  have  been  the  process  by  which 
the  inspired  legislators  of  Israel  did  their  work ;  and  if  it 
be  so,  some  of  the  variations  which  are  now  taken  to  be 
certain  indications  of  different  ages  and  circiimstances 
may  simply  represent  local  varieties  of  the  same  custom. 
Custom  tends  always  to  vary  with  the  locality  within 
certain  narrow  limits.  It  would  be  quite  in  accord  with 
the  general  character  of  ancient  customary  law  to  believe 
that,  provided  the  law  was  on  the  whole  observed,  there 
would  be  no  inclination  to  insist  upon  excluding  small 
local  variations ;  and  equally  so  that  in  a  collection  like  the 
Pentateuch  the  custom  of  one  locality  should  appear  in 
one  place,  that  of  another  in  another.  In  that  case,  to 
insist  that  a  certain  sacrifice,  for  example,  shall  always 
consist  of  the  same   number    of  animals,    and   that    any 


xii.-xxvi.]  LATV  AND  RELIGION  245 


variation  means  a  new  and  later  legislation  on  the  subject, 
is  only   to  make  a  mistake.     The   discrepancy  is   made 
important  only  by  applying  modern  English  views  of  law 
to  ancient  law.     Professor  A.  B.  Davidson  has  shown  in 
the  Introduction  to  his  Ezekiel  (p.  liii.)  that  this  latter  was 
probably  Ezekiel's  view.     "  On  any  hypothesis  of  priority," 
he    says,    "the    differences   in    details    between    him   {ix. 
Ezekiel)  and  the  law  {i.e.  P)  may  be  easiest  explained  by 
supposing  that,  while    the   sacrifices  in  general  and  the 
ideas  which  they  expressed  were  fixed  and  current,  the 
particulars,  such  as  the  kind  of  victims  and  the  number 
of  them,  the  precise  quantity  of  meal,  oil,  and  the  like,  were 
held  non-essential  and   alterable    when    a  change  would 
better  express  the  idea."     The  same  principle  would  apply 
to  the  differences  between  Ezekiel  and  Deuteronomy,  e.g. 
the  omission  of  the  feast  of  weeks  and  of  the  law  of  the 
offering  of  the  firstlings  of  the  flock.     If  so,  then  obviously 
Ezekiel  must  have  thought  that  the  previous  ritual    law 
was  not  meant  to  be  as  binding  as  we  make  it. 

But,  as  has  already  been  remarked,  this  law  was  elastic 
in  more  important  matters ;  often,  even  when  it  seems  to 
legislate,  it  is  only  setting  up  ideals  of  conduct.  Before 
we  leave  this  subject  an  example  should  be  given,  and  the 
law  of  war  may  serve,  especially  if  we  compare  it  with  the 
corresponding  section  of  Manu.  The  provisions  in  Deuter- 
onomy chap.  XX.  according  to  which  on  the  eve  of  a  battle 
the  officers  should  proclaim  to  the  army  that  any  man 
who  had  built  a  new  house  and  had  not  dedicated  it,  or 
who  had  planted  a  vineyard  and  had  not  yet  used  the 
fruit  of  it,  or  who  had  betrothed  a  wife  and  not  yet  taken 
her,  or  who  was  afraid,  should  retire  from  the  danger,  as 
also  the  provisions  that  forbid  the  destruction  of  fruit- 
trees  belonging  to  a  besieged  city,  cannot  have  been  meant 
as  absolute  laws.  Yet  that  is  no  ground  for  supposing 
that  they  could  have   been  introduced  only  after  Israel, 


246  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

having  ceased  to  be  a  sovereign  state,  waged  no  war,  and 
that  consequently  they  are  interpolations  in  the  original 
Deuteronomy.  For  the  similar  provisions  of  the  laws 
of  Manu  were  given  while  kings  reigned,  and  were 
addressed  to  men  constantly  engaged  in  war.  Yet  this 
is  what  we  find  :  'VWhen  he  (the  king)  fights  with  his 
foes  in  battle,  let  him  not  strike  with  weapons  concealed 
(in  wood),  nor  with  (such  as  are)  barbed,  poisoned,  or  the 
points  of  which  are  blowing  with  fire.  Let  him  not  strike 
one  who  (in  flight)  has  climbed  on  an  eminence,  nor  a 
eunuch,  nor  one  who  joins  the  palms  of  his  hands  (in 
supplication),  nor  one  (who  flees)  with  flying  hair,  nor  one 
who  sits  down,  nor  one  who  says  '  I  am  thine/  nor  one 
who  sleeps,  nor  one  who  has  lost  his  coat  of  mail,  nor 
one  who  is  naked,  nor  one  who  is  disarmed,  nor  one  who 
looks  on  without  taking  part  in  the  fight,  nor  one  who  is 
fighting  with  another  foe,  nor  one  whose  weapons  are 
broken,  nor  one  afQicted  (with  sorrow),  nor  one  who  has 
been  grievously  wounded,  nor  one  who  is  in  fear,  nor  one 
who  has  turned  to  flight ;  but  in  all  these  cases  let  him 
remember  the  duty  (of  honourable  warriors)."  With  an 
exact  and  unremitting  obligation  to  observe  these  precepts 
war  would  be  impossible,  and  we  may  be  sure  that  in 
neither  case  were  they  meant  in  that  sense.  They  simply 
set  forth  the  conduct  which  a  chivalrous  soldier  would 
desire  to  follow,  and  would  on  fitting  occasions  actually 
follow  ;  but  by  no  means  what  he  must  do,  or  else  break  with 
his  religion.  Only  by  hypotheses  like  these  can  the  form 
and  the  character  of  such  laws  be  properly  explained, 
and  if  we  keep  them  constantly  in  mind,  some  at  least 
of  the  difficulties  which  result  from  a  comparison  of  the 
law  and  the  histories  may  be  mitigated. 

Such  being  the  character  of  the  Deuteronomic  code,  the 
question  has  been  raised  whether  its  introduction  and 
acceptance   by  Josiah  was  not   a  falling  away   from  the 


xii.-xxvi.]  LAW  AND  RELIGION  247 

spirituality  of  ancient  religion.  Many  modern  writers, 
supported  by  St.  Paul's  dicta  concerning  the  law,  say  that 
it  was.  Indeed  the  very  mention  of  law  seems  to 
depress  writers  on  religion  in  these  days,  and  Deutero- 
nomy appears  to  be  to  them  a  name  of  fear.  But  what- 
ever tendencies  of  modern  thinking  may  have  brought  this 
about,  it  is  nevertheless  true  that  experience  embodied  in 
custom  and  law  is  the  kindly  nurse,  not  the  deadly  enemy, 
of  moral  and  spiritual  life.  Without  law  a  nation  would 
be  absolutely  helpless  ;  and  it  is  inconceivable  that  at  any 
stage  of  Israel's  history  they  were  without  this  guide  and 
support.  As  we  have  seen,  they  never  were.  First  they 
had  customary  law ;  then  along  with  that  short  special 
codes,  e.g.  the  Book  of  the  Covenant  and  the  Deutero- 
nomic  code  ;  and  even  when  the  whole  Pentateuchal  law 
as  we  have  it  had  been  elaborated,  a  good  deal  must  still 
have  been  left  to  custom.  Consequently  there  was 
nothing  so  startling  and  revolutionary  in  the  introduction 
of  Deuteronomy  as  many  have  combined  to  represent. 
Indeed  it  is  difficult  to  see  how  it  altered  anything  in  this 
respect.  Of  all  forms  of  law,  customary  law  is  perhaps 
that  which  demands  and  receives  most  unswerving  obedi- 
ence. Under  it,  therefore,  the  pressure  of  law  was 
heavier  than  it  could  be  in  any  other  form.  It  does  not 
appear  how  the  fact  that  those  observing  it  did  not  think 
of  that  which  they  obeyed  as  law,  but  simply  custom, 
altered  the  essential  nature  of  their  relation  to  it.  They 
were  guided  by  ordinances  which  did  not  express  their 
own  inward  conviction,  and  were  not  a  product  of  their. 
own  thought.  They  obeyed  ordinances  from  without,  and 
these  ought  therefore  to  have  had  the  same  effect  upon 
the  moral  and  spiritual  life  as  written  laws.  For  they 
cannot  be  said  to  have  regulated  only  civil  life.  Religious 
Hfe  (even  if  the  Book  of  the  Covenant  be  Mosaic  or  sub- 
Mosaic,  as  I  believe ;  much  more  i^  it  be  post-Davidic,  as 


248  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

many  say)  must  have  been  largely  regulated  by  the 
customs  of  Israel.  If  law  then  be  in  its  own  nature,  as 
the  antinomians  tell  us,  destructive  of  spontaneity  and 
progress,  if  it  necessarily  externalises  religion,  then  there 
would  have  been  as  little  room  for  the  religion  of  the 
prophets  before  Deuteronomy  as  after  it. 

But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  no  falling  off  in  spirituality  took 
place  after  Deuteronomy.  Wellhausen  says  that  with 
law  freedom  came  to  an  end,  and  this  was  the  death  of 
prophecy.  But  he  can  support  his  thesis  only  by  denying 
the  name  of  prophet  to  all  the  prophets  after  Jeremiah. 
It  is  difficult  to  see  the  basis  of  such  a  distinction.  It  is 
judged  by  this,  if  by  nothing  else — that  it  compels  Well- 
hausen to  deny  that  the  author  of  Second  Isaiah  is  a 
prophet.  That  he  wrote  anonymously  is  held  to  prove 
that  he  felt  this  himself.  Now  a  view  so  extraordinarily 
superficial  has  no  root,  and  every  reader  of  that  most 
touching  and  sublime  of  all  the  Old  Testament  books 
will  simply  stand  amazed  at  the  depth  of  the  critical 
prejudice  which  could  dictate  such  a  judgment.  If  the 
post-Deuteronomic  prophets  are  not  prophets,  then  there 
are  no  prophets  at  all,  and  the  whole  discussion  becomes 
a  useless  logomachy.  But  even  if  Ezekiel  and  Second 
Isaiah  and  the  rest  are  not  prophets,  they  are  at  least  full 
of  spiritual  life  and  power,  so  that  the  decay  of  spiritual 
religion  which  the  adoption  of  Deuteronomy  is  supposed 
to  have  brought  about  must  be  considered  purely  imaginary 
on  that  ground  also.  And  this  contention  is  strengthened 
by  the  theories  of  the  critical  school  themselves.  If  the 
bulk  of  the  Psalms,  as  all  critics  incline  to  believe,  or 
all  of  them,  as  some  say,  are  post-exilic,  then  the  first 
centuries  of  the  post-exilic  period  must  have  been  the  most 
spiritually  minded  epoch  in  Israelite  history.  The  depth 
of  religious  feeling  exhibited  in  the  Psalms,  and  the  com- 
prehension  of  the  inwardness  of  man's  true  relation  to 


xii.-xxvi.]  LAW  AND   RELIGION  249 


God  by  which  they  are  penetrated,  are  the  exact  contrary 
of  the  externality  and  superficiahty  which  the  introduction 
of  written  law  is  said  to  have  produced.  So  long  as  the 
Psalms  were  being  written  religious  life  must  have  been 
vigorous  and  healthy,  and  to  date  the  beginnings  of 
Pharisaic  externalism  from  Josiah's  day  must  consequently 
be  an  error. 

After  what  has  been  said  it  is  scarcely  necessary  to 
discuss  Duhm's  views  of  the  opposition  between  prophecy 
and  Deuteronomy.  It  will  be  sufficient  to  ask  how  the 
latter  can  have  turned  against  prophecy,  when  it  is  in  its 
essence  an  embodiment  of  prophetic  principles  in  law,  and 
was  introduced  and  supported  by  prophets.  But,  it  may 
be  said,  after  all  prophecy  did  decay,  and  ultimately  die, 
and  that  too  during  the  period  after  Deuteronomy.  Is 
there  not  in  that  admitted  fact  a  presumption  that  this  law 
did  work  against  prophecy  ?  If  so,  then  it  is  more  than 
met  by  the  fact  that  the  decay  of  spiritual  religion  became 
noticeable  only  some  centuries  after  this,  and  that  the 
immediate  effect  of  Deuteronomy  was  rather  to  deepen 
and  intensify  religion,  and  to  keep  it  alive  amid  all  the 
vicissitudes  of  the  Captivity  and  Return.  Moreover  the 
break-up  of  the  national  life  was  sufficient  to  account  for 
the  slow  decay  and  final  cessation  of  prophecy.  From  the 
first,  prophecy  had  been  concerned  with  the  building  up 
of  a  nation  which  should  be  faithful  to  Yahweh.  Its  main 
function  had  been  to  interpret  and  to  foretell  the  great 
movements  and  crises  of  national  life — to  read  God's 
purpose  in  the  great  world-movements  and  to  proclaim  it. 
With  Israel's  death  as  a  nation  the  field  of  prophecy 
became  gradually  circumscribed,  and  ultimately  its  voice 
ceased.  Consequently,  though  in  the  main  the  final 
cessation  of  prophecy  was  connected  with  the  rise  of 
externalism  in  religion  and  with  the  great  decay  of  spiritual 
life  in  the  two  or  three  centuries  before  Christ,  the  destruc- 


250  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

tion  of  the  nation  would  account  for  the  feebleness  of 
prophecy  during  a  period  when  the  inner  spiritual  life  was 
flourishing  as  it  flourished  after  Deuteronomy.  Moreover, 
as  religion  became  more  inward  and  personal,  prophecy, 
in  the  Old  Testament  sense,  had  less  place.  Though  in 
New  Testament  times  spiritual  life  and  spiritual  originality 
and  power  were  more  present  than  at  any  time  in  the 
world's  history,  prophecy  did  not  revive.  In  the  whole 
New  Testament  there  is  not  one  purely  prophetic  book 
save  the  Revelation,  and  that  is  apocalyptic  more  than 
simply  prophetic ;  and  though  there  w^as  an  order  of 
prophets  in  the  early  Church,  if  they  had  any  special 
function  other  than  that  of  preachers  their  office  soon  died 
out.  If  then  the  denationalising  of  religion  and  its 
growth  in  individualism  and  inwardness  in  New  Testa- 
ment times  prevented  the  revival  of  prophecy,  we  may 
surely  gather  that  the  same  things,  and  not  the  introduc- 
tion of  written  law,  brought  it  to  an  end  in  the  Old 
Testament. 

Nor  does  St.  Paul's  judgment  as  to  the  meaning  and  use 
of  law,  in  Galatians,  when  rightly  understood,  contradict 
this.  No  doubt  he  seems  to  say  that  the  Mosaic  law  by 
its  very  nature  as  law  is  incompatible  with  grace,  that  it 
necessarily  stands  out  of  relation  to  faith,  and  that  its 
principle  is  a  purely  external  one,  so  much  wages  for  so 
much  work.  Further,  he  clearly  regards  it  as  having  been 
interpolated  into  the  history  of  Israel  between  the  promises 
given  to  Abraham  and  the  fulfilment  of  them  in  the 
redemption  by  Christ,  and  as  having  served  only  to 
increase  sin  and  to  drive  men  thus  to  Christ.  But  when 
he  says  this  he  is  replying  mainly  to  the  Pharisaic  view 
of  the  law  which  was  represented  by  the  Judaizers,  and 
finds  himself  all  the  more  at  home  in  refuting  it  that  it 
was  his  own  view  before  he  became  a  Christian.  Accord- 
ing  to  that  view,  the    whole  law,   both  the    moral   and 


xii.-xxvi.]  LAW  AND  RELIGION  251 

ceremonial  provisions  of  it,  was  necessary  to  obtain  moral 
righteousness,  and  the  mere  doing  of  the  legally  pre- 
scribed things  gave  a  claim  to  the  promised  reward.  So 
interpreted,  law  had  all  the  evil  qualities  he  states,  and 
stood  in  absolute  hostility  to  grace  and  faith,  the  great 
Christian  principles.  The  only  difficulty  is  that  St.  Paul 
does  not  say,  as  we  should  expect  him  to  do,  that  originally 
the  law  was  not  meant  to  be  so  regarded.  He  seems  to 
admit  by  his  silence  that  the  Pharisaic  vifew  of  the  law 
was  the  right  one.  But  if  he  does,  he  cannot  have  meant 
to  include  Deuteronomy.  For  there  law  is  made  to  have 
its  root  and  ground  in  grace.  It  is  given  to  Israel  as  a 
token  of  the  free  love  of  God,  and  it  is  a  law  of  life  which, 
if  kept,  would  make  them  a  peculiar  people  unto  God. 
Further,  love  to  God  is  to  be  the  motive  from  which  all 
obedience  springs,  so  that  this  law  is  bound  up  with  both 
grace  and  faith.  But  the  probability  is  that  St.  Paul 
admits  the  Pharisaic  view  only  because  it  is  that  view  with 
which  alone  he  has  to  contend  in  the  case  in  hand.  For 
in  Romans  vii.  he  gives  us  quite  another  conception  of 
the  Mosaic  law.-^  There  he  is  thinking  of  it  mainly  from 
an  ethical  point  of  view,  and  he  regards  it  as  full  of  the 
Spirit  of  God,  as  a  norm  of  moral  life  which  not  only 
continues  to  be  valid  in  Christianity,  but  which  finds  in 
the  Christian  life  the  very  fulfilment  which  it  was  intended 
to  have.  It  presses  home  too  the  moral  ideal  upon  the 
man  with  extraordinary  power,  and  marks  and  emphasises 
the  terrible  divergence  between  his  aspirations  and  his 
actual  performance.  This  is  a  much  higher  office  than 
that  which  he  assigns  to  lav/  in  Galatians  ;  and  hence  one 
gathers  that  he  is  not  speaking  in  Galatians  exhaustively 
and  conclusively,  but  is  condemning  rather  a  way  of  regard- 
ing the  Mosaic  law  with  which  he  had  once  sympathised 
than  that  law  in  its  own  essential  character.     In  its  moral 

^  Ritschl's  Rechtfcrtigung  and  Versdhinjig,  vol.  ii.,  pp.  3^^^' 


252  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

aspects,  as  represented  by  the  Decalogue,  the  law  is  of 
eternal  obligation.  Yrom.  it  comes  the  light  which  brings 
to  the  Christian  that  moral  unrest  and  dissatisfaction  which 
is  one  of  God's  Divinest  gifts  to  His  people.  In  this  aspect, 
the  law  is  holy  and  just  and  good  :  instead  of  favouring 
the  critical  view  St.  Paul  leaves  it  without  any  fragment 
of  real  support. 

Our  conclusion  is,  therefore,  that  the  antinomianism, 
which  makes  the  acknowledgment  of  Deuteronomy  by 
Josiah  and  his  people  the  turning-point  for  the  worse 
in  the  religious  history  of  Israel,  is  unfounded.  The 
nation  had  always  been  under  law,  and  previous  to 
Deuteronomy  under  even  written  law.  This  code  was 
not  in  any  previously  unheard-of  way  made  the  law  of 
the  kingdom.  Its  very  contents  are  conclusive  against 
that  view,  for  it  contains  much  that  could  not  be  enforced 
by  the  State.  Instead  of  trying  to  do  by  external  means 
that  which  the  persuasions  of  the  prophets  had  failed  to 
do,  Josiah  and  his  people  did  just  what  they  would  have 
had  to  do,  when  they  became  convinced  that  the  prophetic 
principles  ought  to  be  carried  out.  They  made  an  agree- 
ment to  follow  these  Divine  commands,  these  God-given 
principles,  in  actual  life.  But  there  is  no  hint  that  they 
regarded  Deuteronomy  as  the  sum  of  the  Divine  ordinances 
for  the  life  of  men.  Indeed  there  are  many  references  to 
other  Divine  laws ;  and  the  priestly  oracle  remained,  after 
Deuteronomy  as  before  it,  a  source  of  Divine  guidance. 
Deuteronomy  therefore  did  not  destroy  prophecy  ;  the  post- 
exilic  Psalms  are  proof  that  it  did  not  destroy  spiritual  life  : 
and  the  Pauline  view  of  the  law,  in  at  least  one  series  of 
passages,  coincides  entirely  with  the  view  that  law  stated 
as  it  is  stated  in  Deuteronomy  may  be  one  of  the  mightiest 
influences  to  mould,  and  enrich,  and  deepen,  moral  and 
spiritual  life. 


CHAPTER   XIV 

LAWS   OF  SACRIFICE 
Deut.  xii. 

IT  is  a  characteristic  of  all  the  earlier  codes  of  law — the 
Book  of  the  Covenant,  the  Deuteronomic  Code,  and 
the  Law  of  Holiness — that  at  the  head  of  the  series  of 
laws  which  they  contain  there  should  be  a  law  of  sacrifice. 
Probably,  too,  each  of  the  three  had,  as  first  section  of  all,  the 
Decalogue.     The  Book  of  the  Covenant  and  Deuteronomy 
undeniably  have  it  so,  and  the  earlier  element  which  forms 
the  basis  of  Lev.  xvii. — xxvi.  not  improbably  had  originally 
the  same  form.     If  so,  we  may  assume  that  the  order  of 
the  precepts  has  in   a  measure   been  determined  by  the 
order  of  the  commandments.     On  this  account  the  laws 
for  the  cultus  would    naturally  come  first.     For  just  as 
the  first  commandment  is,  '*  Thou  shalt  have  no  other  god 
before  Me,"  and  the  second  forbids  all  idolatrous  images, 
so  the  laws  begin  with  provisions  meant  in  the  main  to 
ward  off  idolatry.     Israel's  great  calling  was   to   receive 
and  to  spread  the  truth  concerning  God.     That  was  the 
centre  of  the  sacred  deposit  of  Divine  and  revealed  truth 
committed  to  that  nation ;  and  it  is  most  instructive  to  see 
how    not   only  in   historical  statements,  but  even  in  the 
form  in  which  early  IsraeHte  legislation  is  handed  down 
to  us,  the  Decalogue  dominates  all  the  details  of  it.     It 
formulated  in   as   concrete  a  shape  as  was   possible   the 
Divine  demand  that  Israelites  should  love  God  and  their 

253 


254  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

neighbour,    and   therefore  the   legislative   provisions   and 
statutes  begin  with  ordinances  dealing  with  sacrifice. 

Tq  us  in  modern  times  it  may  seem  almost  bathos  to 
connect  such  an  antecedent  with  such  a  consequent ;  but 
it  seems  so,  only  because  we  have  difficulty  in  apprehending 
the  meaning  and  importance  of  sacrifice  in  primitive  reli- 
gion. For  sacrifice  had  in  Israel  a  meaning  and  importance 
of  its  own,  and  a  present  value  at  every  period,  which  in 
no  way  depended  upon  its  typical  or  prophetic  value  as 
pointing  forward  to  the  sacrifice  of  Christ.  It  supplied 
the  religious  needs  of  men  even  apart  from  the  clearness 
of  their  knowledge  about  its  ultimate  purpose.  Sacrifice, 
especially  in  its  simplest  meaning,  was  in  heathenism 
absolutely  essential  as  a  means  of  approach  to  God.  To 
come  before  a  great  man  without  a  gift  was  in  ancient 
days  an  outrage.  It  was  therefore  inevitable  that  men 
should  approach  their  gods  in  the  same  manner.  Sacrificial 
gifts  expressed  the  dependent's  joy  in  a  gracious  lord,  and 
also  the  homage  and  reverence  due  from  a  subject  to  a 
king.  Further,  as  all  good  things  were  regarded  as  the 
gifts  of  the  gods  to  their  worshippers,  the  sacrifices  con- 
veyed thanks  for  good  gifts  received,  and  joined  the  gods 
and  their  worshippers  by  a  common  participation  in  the 
Divine  gift  which  connected  them  as  eaters  at  the  same 
table.  But  sacrifices  had  a  higher  reach  of  expression 
even  than  that.  As  they  were  brought  to  the  gods  they 
were  the  symbols  of  the  self-devotion  of  the  offerer  to 
the  service  of  his  god  ;  and  where  there  was  need  of  pro- 
pitiation because  of  offence  consciously  given,  or  offence 
felt  by  the  deity  for  unknown  reasons,  these  gifts  took  on 
in  some  measure  a  reconciling  or  propitiatory  quality. 

Now  the  Old  Testament  sacrifices  had  in  them,  un- 
questionably, all  these  elements  :  but  as  Yahweh  was  high 
above  all  heathen  deities  in  moral  character,  they  also 
took  on  a  depth  and  intensity  of  meaning  which   they 


xii.]  LAWS  OF  SACRIFICE  255 

could  never  have  on  the  soil  of  heathen  religious  concep- 
tions. Along  this  line  of  sacrificial  ritual,  therefore,  all 
the  spiritual  emotions  of  Israel  flowed  ;  and  to  hold  tMat 
sacrifice  had  no  real  place  in  the  religion  of  Yahweh 
would  be  almost  equivalent  to  saying  that  neither  love, 
nor  penitence,  nor  prayer,  had  any  real  place  in  it  either. 
All  these  found  utterance  in  sacrifice  and  along  with  it ; 
and  it  has  yet  to  be  shown  that  they  had  any  regular  and 
acceptable  utterance  otherwise.  To  regulate  sacrifice  and 
keep  it  pure  must,  therefore,  have  been  one  chief  means 
of  guarding  against  the  degradation  of  Yahweh  to  the 
level  of  the  gods  of  the  heathen. 

But  there  is  another  and  very  important  reason  for  it. 
Both  in  the  days  when  Moses  parted  from  his  people,  and 
also  in  the  time  of  Manasseh,  the  people  stood  confronted 
by  very  special  danger  just  at  this  point. 

At  the  earlier  period  they  were  about  to  enter  upon 
intimate  contact  with  the  Canaanites,  their  superiors 
in  culture  and  in  all  the  arts  of  civilised  life,  but  cor- 
rupted to  the  core.  Further,  the  Canaanite  corruption 
was  focussed  in  their  religious  rites  and  worship,  and 
evil  could  not  fail  to  follow  if  the  people  suffered  them- 
selves to  be  drawn  into  any  participation  in  it.  For  if 
Professor  Robertson  Smith  be  right,  the  central  point  of 
ancient  sacrifice  was  the  communion  between  the  god  and 
his  worshippers  in  the  sacrificial  feast.  They  became  of 
one  kin  with  each  other  and  with  the  god,  and  this  close 
relationship  made  the  communication  of  spiritual  and  moral 
infection  almost  a  certainty. 

In  Manasseh's  day  again  it  was  natural  that  legislation 
on  the  same  subject,  and  warnings  of  even  a  more  solemn 
kind,  should  be  repeated.  A  prophetic  lawgiver  writing 
at  that  date  had  before  him,  not  only  the  possibility  ot 
evil,  but  actual  experience  of  it.  The  laws  and  warnings 
of  the  earlier  code  had  been  defied  and  neglected.  ,  The 


256  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

faith  of  the  chosen  people  had  been  miserably  perverted 
by  contact  with  the  Canaanites  ;  the  whole  history  of 
prophecy  had  been  a  struggle  against  corrupt  and  insincere 
worship  ;  and  now  the  monstrous  sacrifices  to  Moloch  and 
the  invasion  of  Assyrian  idolatry  had  degraded  Yahweh 
and  destroyed  His  people,  so  that  scarce  any  hope  of 
recovery  remained.  In  bracing  himself  for  one  more 
struggle  with  this  desperate  corruption,  the  Deuteronomist 
naturally  repeated  in  deeper  tones  the  Mosaic  warnings. 
The  command  utterly  to  uproot  and  trample  under  foot 
the  symbols  and  instruments  of  Canaanite  worship,  he 
brings,  from  the  less  prominent  place  it  occupies  in  the 
Book  of  the  Covenant,  to  the  first  place  in  his  own  code. 
To  break  with  that  and  all  other  forms  of  idolatry,  utterly 
and  decisively,  had  come  to  be  the  first  condition  of  any 
upward  movement.  The  degrading  and  defiling  bondage 
to  idolatry  into  which  his  people  had  fallen  must  end. 
With  trumpet  tongue  he  calls  upon  them  to  break  down 
the  Canaanite  altars,  dash  in  pieces  their  obelisks,  and 
burn  their  Asherim  with  fire. 

To  some  moderns  it  may  seem  that  such  excessive 
energy  might,  with  better  effect,  have  been  expended  upon 
the  denunciation  of  moral  evils,  such  as  cruelty  and  lust 
and  oppression,  rather  than  of  idolatry.  We  have  grown 
so  accustomed  to  the  distinctions  drawn  by  the  Church 
of  Rome,  and  in  later  times  by  the  neo-classicists,  between 
worshipping  God  through  an  image  or  a  picture,  or 
in  any  natural  object  or  natural  force,  and  the  actual 
worship  of  the  image  or  picture  or  natural  object  itself, 
that  we  have  sophisticated  our  minds.  But  the  author 
of  Deuteronomy  knew  by  bitter  experience  that  such 
subtle,  and,  in  great  part,  sophistical  distinctions  had  no 
application  to  his  people  and  his  time.  Their  worst 
immoralities  were,  he  knew  well,  rooted  in  their  idol- 
worship.      For   idolatry  in    any    form    binds    all    that    is 


xii.]  LAWS   OF  SACRIFICE  257 


highest  in  man  to  the  sphere  of  nature,  ie.  of  moral  in- 
difference. Just  as  a  conception  of  God  which  rigorously 
separated  Him  from  nature,  which  made  His  will  the 
supreme  impelling  force  in  the  world,  and  which  conceived 
His  essential  attributes  to  be  entirely  ethical,  was  the 
fountain  of  the  higher  life  in  Israel,  so  a  lapse  into  idolatry 
of  any  kind  was  the  negation  of  it  all.  No  doubt  some 
moral  life  would  have  remained  in  Israel,  even  if  the  lapse 
had  become  universal.  But,  even  at  its  best,  this  natural 
morality  of  self-preservation  has  no  future  and  no  goal. 
It  does  not  lead  the  van  of  human  progress ;  it  merely 
comes  after,  to  ratify  the  results  of  it.  Only  when  social 
morality  is  taken  up  into  a  wider  sphere  than  its  own, — 
only  when  it  is  conceived  as  the  path  by  which  man  can 
co-operate  with  a  sublime  purpose  lying  beyond  himself, 
— can  it  maintain  itself  as  the  inspiration  of  human  life, 
impelling  to  progress  and  guiding  it.^  Now,  so  far  as 
history  teaches,  this  energy  of  moral  life  has  been  attained 
only  where  the  conception  of  God  which  makes  moral 
perfection  to  be  His  essential  nature  has  been  accepted 
and  cherished.  But  no  natural  religion  can  rise  to  that ; 
hence  idolatry  must  always  be  destructive  of  ethical  religion. 
It  must  destroy  faith  in  the  moral  character  of  God. 

Further,  it  must  destroy  the  moral  character  of  man. 
In  the  last  resort  all  idolaters  are  equally  acceptable  to 
their  god,  if  only  they  bring  the  prescribed  gifts  and 
accurately  perform  the  prescribed  ceremonies.  The  lewd 
and  the  chaste,  the  cruel  and  the  merciful,  the  revengeful 
and  the  forgiving,  are  all  equally  accepted  when  they 
sacrifice.  Non-moral  or  positively  immoral  gods  can 
care  nothing  about  such  differences.  Of  this  fact  and 
its  results  no  man  acquainted  with  the  history  of  Israel 
could  doubt.     The  main  zeal  of  the  prophets  was  at  all 

'  Cf.  Riehm,  Old  Tesiaiuent  Theology,  p.  25. 

17 


258  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

times  directed  against  those  who  were  steeped  in  moral 
evil,  but  were  zealous  in  all  that  concerned  sacrifice,  and 
against  the  amazing  folly  of  a  people  who  thought  to 
bind  the  living  God  to  their  cause  and  their  interests  by 
mere  bribes,  in  the  shape  of  thousands  of  bullocks  and 
ten  thousand  rivers  of  oil.  This  conception  was  bound 
up  essentially  with  idolatry.  But  the  evil  of  it  was 
intensified  in  the  Semitic  idolatries  with  which  Israel 
specially  defiled  itself.  Their  cruelty  and  obscenity  were 
unspeakable.  Now  by  Israel's  idolatry  Yahweh  was  made 
to  appear  tolerant  of  Moloch  and  Baal,  as  if  they  were 
equals.  Every  quality  which  the  Mosaic  revelation  had 
set  forth  as  essential  to  the  character  of  Yahweh — His 
purity.  His  mercy,  His  truth — was  outraged  by  the  society 
which  His  worshippers  in  Manasseh's  days  had  thrust 
upon  Him.  No  reform,  then,  had  the  least  chance  of 
stability  till  the  axe  was  laid  at  the  root  of  this  wide- 
spreading  upas  tree. 

Deuteronomy,  therefore,  grapples  first  and  grapples 
thoroughly  with  the  evil,  and  strikes  it  a  blow  from  which 
it  was  never  to  recover.  The  inspired  writer  repeats  with 
new  energy  the  old  decrees  of  utter  destruction  against 
the  Canaanite  sanctuaries ;  for  though  these  were  for  the 
most  part  no  longer  in  Canaanite  hands,  the  High  Places 
still  existed  ;  and  the  principle  of  that  old  prohibition  was 
more  clamant  for  recognition  and  realisation  than  it  had 
ever  been  in  the  history  of  Israel  before. 

Then  he  goes  on  to  proclaim  the  new  law,  that  no  sacri- 
fice should  any  longer  be  offered  save  at  the  one  central 
sanctuary  chosen  by  Yahweh.  There  is  no  such  provi- 
sion in  the  Book  of  the  Covenant,  and  there  is  no  hint  in 
the  legislation  of  Deuteronomy  that  its  author  knew  of 
the  Tabernacle  and  its  sole  right  as  a  place  of  sacrifice. 
From  beginning  to  end  of  the  code  he  never  mentions 
the  Tabernacle  nor  the  sacrifices  there ;  and  in  the  very 


xii.]  LAIVS   OF  SACRIFICE  259 

terms  in  which  he  permits  the  slaughter  of  animals  for 
food  in  vv.  15,  16,  and  2025,  though  he  obviously  repeals 
a  custom  which  has  been  embodied  in  the  Priestly  Code 
as  a  law  (Lev.  xvii.  3  ff.),  he  makes  no  reference  to  that 
passage.  Consequently  this  at  least  may  be  said,  that 
he  may  quite  conceivably  have  been  ignorant  of  Lev. 
xvii.  3  ff .  In  ignorance  of  it,  he  might  write  as  he  has 
done ;  and  if  not  ignorant,  it  would  be  much  more  natural 
to  refer  to  it.  When  we  add  to  this  negative  testimony 
the  positive  testimony  of  verses  8  and  13,  which  we  have 
already  discussed  in  Chapter  L,  there  would  seem  to 
be  little  room  for  doubt  that  the  priestly  law  on  this 
subject  was  not  before  the  writer  of  Deuteronomy.  Con- 
sequently we  are  justified  in  regarding  this  as  the  first 
written  law  actually  promulgated  on  this  subject. 
Hezekiah  had  attempted  the  same  reform ;  but  he  had, 
so  far  as  we  know,  neither  published  nor  referred  to 
any  law  commanding  it,  and  his  work  was  entirely 
undone.  The  Deuteronomist,  more  convinced  than  he 
that  this  step  was  absolutely  necessary  to  complete  the 
Mosaic  legislation  on  idolatry,  and  filled  with  the  same 
inspiration  of  the  Almighty,  completed  it ;  and  though  a 
reaction  followed  Josiah's  enforcement  of  this  law  also, 
its  existence  saved  the  life  of  the  nation.  Its  principles 
kept  the  nation  holy,  ie.  separate  to  their  God,  during 
the  Exile,  and  at  the  return  they  were  dominant  in  the 
formation  of  the  "  congregation." 

Certainly  there  is  no  lack  of  earnestness  in  the  way 
in  which  these  principles  are  urged.  With  that  love  of 
repetition  which  is  a  distinguishing  mark  of  this  writer, 
he  expresses  the  commandment  first  positively,  then 
negatively.  Then  he  brings  in  the  consequential  altera- 
tion in  the  law  regarding  the  slaughtering  of  animals  for 
food.  Again  he  returns  to  the  command,  explaining, 
enlarging,  insisting,   and  concludes  with  a  reiteration  of 


26o  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  permission  to  slaughter.  Efforts,  of  course,  have  been 
made  to  show  that  this  repetition  is  due  to  the  amalgama- 
tion here  of  no  fewer  than  seven  separate  documents  ! 
But  little  heed  need  be  given  to  such  fantastic  attempts. 
It  is,  once  for  all,  a  habit  of  this  writer's  mind  to  shrink 
from  no  monotony  of  this  kind.  There  is  not  one  im- 
portant idea  in  his  book  which  he  does  not  repeat  again 
and  again ;  and  where  repetition  is  so  constant  a  feature, 
and  where  the  language  and  thought  is  so  consistent  as 
it  is  here,  it  is  worse  than  useless  to  assert  separate 
documents.  The  writer's  earnestness  is  sufficient  ex- 
planation. He  saw  plainly  that,  so  long  as  the  pro- 
vincial High  Places  existed  and  were  popular,  it  would 
be  impossible  to  secure  purity  of  worship.  The  heathen 
conceptions  of  the  Canaanites  clung  about  their  ancient 
sanctuaries,  and,  like  the  mists  from  a  fever  swamp, 
infected  everything  that  came  near.  Inspection  suffi- 
ciently minute  and  constant  to  be  of  use  was  impracticable ; 
there  remained  nothing  but  to  decree  their  abandon- 
ment. When  the  whole  worship  of  the  people  was 
centred  at  Jerusalem,  coiTuption  of  the  idolatrous  kind 
would,  it  was  hoped,  be  impossible.  There,  a  pious  king 
could  watch  over  it ;  there,  the  Temple  priesthood  had 
attained  to  worthier  ideas  in  regard  to  sacrifice  and  the 
fulfilment  of  the  law  than  the  priests  elsewhere.  Josiah 
accordingly  rigorously  enforced  this  new  law. 

Such  a  change,  aimed  solely  at  religious  ends,  did  not 
stop  there.  In  many  ways  it  affected  the  social  life  of  the 
people;  in  vv.  15,  16,  and  20,  24,  the  author  meets  one 
hardship  connected  with  the  new  law,  by  allowing  men  to 
slay  for  food  at  a  distance  from  the  altar.  According  to 
ancient  custom,  no  flesh  could  be  eaten  by  any  Israelite, 
save  when  the  fat  and  the  blood  had  been  presented 
at  the  altar.  During  the  wilderness  journey  there  would 
be    little    difficult}^    regarding    this.     In    the    desert   very 


xii.]  LAIVS  OF  SACRIFICE  261 

little  meat  is  eaten ;  and  so  long  as  life  was  nomadic 
there  would  be  no  hardship  in  demanding  that  those 
who  wished  to  make  sacrificial  feasts  should  wander 
towards  the  central  place  of  worship  rather  than  from  it. 
It  has  been  disputed  whether  there  was  in  those  days  a 
tabernacle  such  as  the  Priestly  Code  describes  ;  but  there 
certainly  was,  according  to  the  earliest  documents,  a  tent 
in  which  Yahweh  revealed  Himself  and  gave  responses. 
As  we  have  seen,  there  must  have  been  sacrifice  in 
connection  with  it ;  and  though  worship  at  other  places 
where  Yahweh  had  made  His  name  to  be  remembered 
was  permitted,  this  sanctuary  in  the  camp  must  have  had 
a  certain  pre-eminence.  A  tendency,  but  according  to 
the  words  of  Deuteronomy  nothing  stronger  than  a 
tendency,  must  have  shown  itself  to  make  this  the  main 
place  of  worship. 

When  the  people  crossed  the  Jordan  into  the  land  pro- 
mised to  the  fathers,  and  had  abandoned  the  nomadic 
life,  great  difficulty  must  have  arisen.  For  those  at  a 
distance  from  the  place  where  the  Tabernacle  was  set  up, 
the  eating  of  meat  and  the  enjoyment  of  sacrificial  feasts 
would,  by  this  ancient  customary  law,  have  been  rendered 
impossible,  if  the  attendance  at  one  sanctuary  had  been 
obligatory.  Only  if  men  could  come  to  local  sanctuaries, 
each  in  his  own  neighbourhood,  could  the  religious  cha- 
racter of  the  festivals  at  which  meat  was  eaten  be  pre- 
served. The  nature  of  men's  occupations,  now  that  they 
had  become  settled  agriculturists,  and  the  dangers  from 
the  Canaanites  so  long  as  they  were  not  entirely  subdued 
and  absorbed,  ahke  forbade  such  long  and  frequent 
journeys  to  a  central  sanctuary.  The  conquest  must 
consequently  at  once  have  checked  any  tendency  to 
centralisation  that  may  have  existed ;  and  there  is  reason 
to  believe  that  the  acceptance  of  the  Canaanite  High  Places 
as  sanctuaries  of  Yahweh  was  in  great  part  caused  by  the 


THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


demands  of  this  ancient  law  concerning  the  "zebhach." 
In  any  case  it  must  have  helped  to  overcome  any  scruples 
that  may  have  existed.  But  when  the  Tabernacle  and 
Ark  were  brought  to  Zion,  and  still  more  when  the 
Temple  was  built,  the  centripetal  tendency,  never  altogether 
dead,  must  have  revived.  For  there  was  peace  through- 
out the  land  and  beyond  it.  No  danger  from  the  Canaan- 
ites  existed  ;  and  the  political  centralisation  which  Solomon 
aimed  at,  and  actually  carried  out,  as  well  as  the  superior 
magnificence  of  the  Solomonic  Temple  and  its  priests, 
must  have  attracted  to  Jerusalem  the  thoughts  and  the 
reverence  of  the  whole  people.  What  Deuteronomy  now 
makes  law  may  have  then  first  arisen  as  a  demand  of 
the  Jerusalem  priests.  At  all  events,  the  very  existence 
of  the  Temple  must  have  been  a  menace  to  the  High 
Places ;  and  we  may  be  sure  that  among  the  motives 
which  led  the  ten  tribes  to  reject  the  Davidic  house, 
jealousy  for  the  local  sanctuaries  must  have  been 
prominent. 

But  the  separation  of  the  ten  tribes  would  only  strengthen 
the  claim  of  the  Temple  on  Zion  to  be  for  Judah  the  one 
true  place  of  worship.  The  territory  ruled  from  Jerusalem 
was  now  so  small  that  resort  to  the  central  sanctuary 
was  comparatively  easy.  The  glorious  memories  of  the 
Davidic  and  .Solomonic  time  would  centre  round  Jeru- 
salem. Any  local  sanctuaries  would  be  entirely  dwarfed 
and  overshadowed  by  the  splendour  and  the,  at  least 
comparative,  purity  of  the  worship  there.  Priests  of  local 
altars  too  must  inevitably  have  sunk  in  the  popular  estima- 
tion, and  even  in  their  own,  to  a  secondary  and  subordinate 
position,  as  compared  with  the  carefully  organised  and 
strictly  graded  Jerusalem  priests.  Even  without  a  positive 
command,  therefore,  the  people  of  Judah  must  have  been 
gradually  growing  into  the  habit  of  seeking  Yahweh  at 
Jerusalem   on  all  more   solemn  religious   occasions ;  and 


xii.]  LAWS   OF  SACRIFICE  263 

though  the  High  Places  might  exist,  their  repute  in  the 
Southern  Kingdom  must  have  been  decreasing.  Of  course 
if  a  command  was  given  in  the  Mosaic  time  which  had 
been  neglected,  the  tendencies  here  traced  must  have 
been  stronger  and  more  definite  than  we  have  depicted 
them.  When  the  prophetic  teachings  of  Isaiah  which  pro- 
claimed Jerusalem  to  be  ''Ariel,"  the  **  sacrificial  hearth," 
or  "  the  hearth  of  God,"  were  so  wondrously  confirmed  by 
the  destruction  of  Sennacherib's  host  before  the  city,  the 
unique  position  of  Zion  must  have  been  secured ;  and  after 
that  only  those  who  were  set  upon  idolatry  can  have 
had  much  interest  in  the  High  Places.  Hezekiah's  effort 
to  abolish  these  latter  is  quite  intelligible  in  these  circum- 
stances ;  and  we  may  feel  assured  that,  as  Wellhausen 
says,^  "  The  Jewish  royal  temple  had  early  overshadowed 
the  other  sanctuaries,  and  in  the  course  of  the  seventh 
century  they  were  extinct  or  verging  on  extinction." 

Along  with  this  there  must  have  grown  up  a  measure 
of  laxity  in  regard  to  the  provision  that  all  slaughtering 
for  food  should  take  place  at  the  sanctuary.  Many  would 
doubtless  go  to  Zion,  many  would  continue  to  resort  to  the 
High  Places,  and  a  number,  from  a  mere  halting  between 
two  opinions,  would  probably  take  their  "  zebhachim " 
to  neither.  Consequently  the  law  before  us  would  by 
no  means  be  so  revolutionary  as  Duhm,  for  instance, 
pictures  it.  He  says  :  "  I  do  not  know  if  in  the  whole 
history  of  the  world  a  law  can  be  pointed  to  which  was 
so  fitted  to  change  a  whole  people  in  its  innermost  nature 
and  in  its  outward  appearance,  at  one  stroke,  as  this  was. 
The  Catholic  Church  even  has  never  by  all  her  laws  suc- 
ceeded in  anything  in  the  least  hke  it."  But  we  have 
seen  evidence  of  a  very  strong  and  continuous  pressure  to 
this  point,  at  least  in  Judah.     History  during  centuries  had 

•  Wellhausen,  History,  p.  420. 


264  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

justified  and  intensified  it;  so  that  in  all  probability  the 
true  worshippers  of  Yahweh  found  in  the  new  law  not  so 
much  a  revolution  as  a  ratification  of  their  already  ancient 
practice.  To  idolaters,  of  course,  its  adoption  must  have 
meant  a  cessation  of  their  idolatry ;  but  the  change  in  the 
people  and  in  their  life  would,  though  extensive,  be  only 
such  as  any  ordinary  reform  would  produce.  Duhm 
overlooks  altogether  the  very  small  territory  which  the 
law  affected.  A  long  day's  walk  would  bring  men  from 
Jericho,  from  Hebron,  from  the  borders  of  the  Philistine 
country,  and  from  Shechem  and  Samaria  to  Jerusalem. 
If  Deuteronomy  made  a  revolution,  it  must  have  been 
confined  within  the  modest  limits  of  substituting  a  whole 
for  a  half-day's  journey  to  the  Sanctuary. 

Moreover  it  is  a  mistake  to  say  that  sacrifice  at  one 
central  sanctuary  ''  took  religion  away  from  the  people,"  as 
Duhm  says.  If  spiritual  religion  be  meant,  it  ultimately 
brought  religion  more  vitally  home  to  them.  For  when 
the  priestly  system  was  fully  carried  out,  the  demands  of 
household  religion  were  met,  as  the  post-exilic  Psalms 
show,  by  the  adoption  of  the  practice  of  household  prayer 
without  reference  to  sacrifice,  and  finally  by  the  institution 
of  the  synagogue.  A  more  spiritual  method  of  approach 
to  God  was  substituted  for  a  less  spiritual  in  the  remote 
places  and  in  the  homes  of  the  people.  And  the  public 
worship  even  gained.  It  became  deeper,  and  more  pene- 
trated with  a  sense  of  the  necessity  of  deliverance  from 
sin.  It  is  true,  of  course,  that  in  the  end  Pharisaic 
legalism  perverted  the  new  forms  of  worship,  as  heathen 
externalism  had  perverted  the  old.  But  in  neither  case 
was  the  perversion  a  necessity.  In  both  it  was  simply 
a  manifestation  of  the  materialistic  tendency  which  dogs 
the  footsteps  of  even  the  most  spiritual  religion,  when  it 
has  to  realise  itself  in  the  life  of  man.  It  is  enough  for 
the  justification  of  the  whole  movement  led  by  Josiah  to 


xii.]  LAWS   OF  SACRIFICE  265 

say  that  it  held  the  Judgean  exiles  together ;  that  it  kept 
alive  in  their  hearts,  as  nothing  else  did,  their  faith  in  God 
and  in  their  future  ;  and  that  on  their  return  it  gave  them 
the  form  which  their  institutions  could  most  profitably 
take.  Further,  under  the  forms  of  religious  and  social 
life  which  this  movement  generated,  the  true,  heartfelt  piety 
which  the  prophets  so  mourned  the  want  of  became  more 
common  than  ever  it  had  been  before. 

The  establishment  of  the  central  altar  as  the  only  one 
was  the  main  object  of  this  law ;  but  there  is  much  to  be 
learned  from  the  very  terms  in  which  this  is  expressed. 
They  breathe  the  same  love  for  man  and  sympathy  with 
the  poor  which  forms  one  of  the  most  attractive  charac- 
teristics of  our  book.  The  gracious  bonds  of  family 
affection,  the  kindly  feeling  that  should  unite  masters 
and  servants,  the  helpfulness  which  ought  to  distinguish 
the  conduct  of  the  rich  to  the  poor,  and  above  all  the 
cheerful  enjoyment  of  the  results  of  honest  labour, 
are  to  be  preserved  and  sanctified  even  in  the  ritual  of 
sacrifice.  *'  Thou  shalt  rejoice  before  Yahweh  in  all  that 
thou  puttest  thine  hand  unto,"  is  here  the  motto,  if  we 
may  so  speak,  of  religious  service.  That,  indeed,  is  to  be 
made  the  opportunity  for  the  discharge  of  all  humane  and 
brotherly  duties  ;  and  the  religious  hfe  is  at  its  highest 
when  the  worshipper  rejoices  himself,  and  shares  and  sheds 
abroad  his  joy  upon  others.  The  love  of  God  is  here  most 
intimately  blended  with  love  of  the  brethren.  Masters 
and  servants,  slaves  and  free,  the  high  and  the  low,  are  to 
be  reminded  of  their  equal  standing  in  the  sight  of  God, 
by  their  common  participation  in  the  sacrificial  meals ;  and 
the  poorest  are  to  be  permitted  an  equal  enjoyment  of 
the  luxuries  of  the  rich  in  these  solemn  approaches  to 
Yahweh.  The  Deuteronomist  here  reaches  the  highest 
stage  of  religious  life,  in  that  he  shows  himself  in  nowise 
afraid  of  human  joy.     As  we  have  seen,  he   knows  the 


266  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

value  of  austerity  in  religion.  He  is  well  enough  aware 
that  war  against  evil  is  not  made  with  rose-water.  But 
then  he  is  equally  far  from  the  extreme  of  suspecting 
all  affection  not  directly  turned  to  God,  of  regarding 
natural  gladness  as  a  ruinous  snare  to  the  soul.  This 
finely  balanced,  this  just  attitude  to  all  aspects  of  life,  is 
a  most  notable  thing  at  this  epoch  in  the  history  of  .the 
world,  and  considering  the  circumstances  of  the  time  it  is 
little  short  of  a  marvel.  It  is  true,  of  course,  that  the 
religion  of  Israel  was  always  finely  human.  It  could  run 
into  excesses,  and  was  marked  by  many  imperfections ; 
but  asceticism,  the  doctrine  which  holds  pain  and  self- 
denial  to  be  in  themselves  good,  when  it  did  intrude  into 
Israel,  always  came  from  without.  Nevertheless  the 
heartiness  and  thoroughness  with  which  all  gracious 
human  feelings  and  all  kindly  human  relations  are  here 
taken  up  into  religion  is  remarkable,  even  in  the  Old 
Testament.  More,  perhaps,  than  anything  else  in  this 
book,  it  shows  the  sweetening  and  wholesome  effect  of 
demanding  supreme  love  to  God  as  man's  first  duty. 
"  If  any  man  come  to  Me  and  hate  not  his  father  and 
mother,"  says  Christ,  "he  cannot  be  My  disciple,"^  and 
many  purblind  critics  have  found  this  to  be  a  hard  saying. 
But  all  who  know  men  know,  that  when  God  in  Christ  is 
made  so  much  the  supreme  object  of  love  that  even  the 
most  sacred  human  obligations  seem  to  be  disregarded  in 
comparison,  the  human  affection  so  thrust  into  the  back- 
ground is  only  made  richer  far  than  it  otherwise  could  be. 

'  Luke  xiv.  26. 


CHAPTER   XV 

THE  RELATION  OF  OLD   TESTAMENT  SACRIFICE   TO 
CHRISTIANITY 

BUT  it  may  be  asked,  What  is  the  relation  of  this 
Divinely  sanctioned  ritual  law  of  sacrifice  to  our 
religion  in  its  present  phase  ?  To  that  question  various 
answers  are  being  returned,  and  indeed  it  may  be  said  that 
on  this  point  almost  all  the  main  differences  of  Christians 
turn.  The  Church  of  Rome  maintains  in  essence  the 
sacerdotal  view  of  the  later  Old  Testament  times,  though 
in  a  spiritualised  Christian  shape,  and  to  this  the  High 
Anglican  view  is  a  more  or  less  pronounced  return.  The 
Protestant  Churches,  on  the  other  hand,  regard  priests  and 
sacrifices  as  anachronisms  since  the  death  of  Christ.  In 
that,  for  the  most  part,  they  regard  the  significance  of 
sacrifice  as  being  summed  up  and  completed ;  and  the 
present  dispensation  is  for  them  the  realisation  in  embryo 
of  that  which  Old  Testament  saints  looked  forward  to — 
a  people  of  God,  every  true  member  of  which  is  both 
priest  and  prophet,  i.e.  has  free  and  unrestricted  access  to 
God,  and  is  authorised  and  required  to  speak  in  His  name. 
The  interest  of  Protestant  Christians,  therefore,  in  priest- 
hood and  sacrifice  in  the  Old  Testament  sense,  though  very 
great  and  enduring;-  has  no  connection  with  the  continuation 
of  sacrifice.  They  look  upon  the  Old  Testament  ritual  as 
wholly  obsolete  now.  It  was  simply  a  stage  in  the  religious 
development  of  the  chosen  people,  and  as  such  it  has  no 
claim  to  be  continued  among  Christians. 

267 


268  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


By  a  curious  allegorical  process,  however,  some  devout 
Protestants  keep  alive  their  interest  in  Old  Testament 
ritual  by  finding  in  it  an  elaborate  symbolism  covering  the 
whole  field  of  evangelical  theology.  But  this  revivification 
of  the  old  law  is  too  arbitrary  and  subjective,  as  well  as 
too  improbable,  to  have  an  abiding  place  in  Christianity. 
It  is,  moreover,  useless  for  the  guidance  of  life ;  for  all  that 
is  thus  ingeniously  put  into  the  Levitical  ordinances  is 
found  more  clearly  and  directly  expressed  elsewhere. 
The  amount  of  religious  symbolism  in  the  earlier  stages 
of  Israelite  religion  is  small,  and  very  simple  and  direct. 
Even  in  the  most  elaborate  parts  of  the  Levitical  legislation, 
e.g.  in  the  directions  regarding  the  Tabernacle,  the  pur- 
posely allegorical  element  is  kept  within  comparatively 
narrow  limits  ;  and  we  may  boldly  say  that  the  mind  which 
delights  in  finding  spiritual  mysteries  in  every  detail  of 
the  sacrificial  ritual  is  Rabbinical  rather  than  Christian. 
On  the  other  hand  we  need  not  enter  upon  a  discussion  of 
the  view  held  by  "  Modern  "  or  Broad  Church  theologians 
and  by  Unitarians,  that  sacrifice  was  merely  a  heathen 
form  taken  over  into  Mosaism,  that  it  had  no  special 
significance  there,  and  that  the  ideas  connected  with  it 
have  absolutely  no  place  in  enlightened  Christian  theology. 
The  Christianity  which  attaches  no  sacrificial  signification 
to  the  death  of  Christ  has,  so  far  as  I  know,  never  shown 
itself  to  be  a  type  of  religion  able  to  create  a  future,  and 
it  is  only  with  types  of  Christianity  that  do  and  can  live 
we  have  to  do.  Our  question  here  therefore  is  limited 
to  this.  Which  of  the  two  types  of  view,  the  Roman 
Catholic  or  the  Protestant,  is  truest  to  the  Old  Testament 
teaching  ? 

Externally,  perhaps,  the  evidence  seems  to  favour  the 
Roman  Catholic  position ;  for  the  prophets  either  directly 
say,  or  imply,  that  sacrifice  shall  be  restored  with  new 
purity  and  power  in  the  Messianic  time.    This  is  so  patent 


OLD   TESTAMENT  SACRIFICE  AND   CHRISTIANITY   269 

a  fact  that  it  led  Edward  Irving  to  say  that  it  was  the  Old 
Testament  economy  that  should  abide,  and  that  of  the 
New  Testament  which  should  pass  away.  But  the  inner 
progress  and  development  of  Old  Testament  religion  is 
quite  as  decisively  on  the  other  side.  As  we  have  seen, 
Old  Testament  piety  had  at  the  beginning  almost  no 
recognised  expression  save  in  connection  with  sacrifice, 
and  the  Exile  first  trained  the  people  to  faithfulness 
to  God  without  it,  sowing  the  seed  of  a  religious  life 
largely  separate  from  the  sacrificial  ritual.  Then  the 
ordinance  demanding  sacrifice  at  one  central  altar,  which, 
though  introduced  by  Deuteronomy,  was  made  the  exclu- 
sive law  only  by  the  post-exilic  community,  furthered 
the  growth  of  these  germs,  so  that  they  produced  the 
synagogue  system.  This  completed  the  severance  of  the 
ordinary  daily  religion  of  the  bulk  of  the  people  from 
sacrificial  ritual,  so  far  as  that  was  attained  within  the 
limits  of  Judaism,  and  prepared  the  way  for  Pauline 
Christianity,  in  which  all  allegiance  to  ritual  Judaism  is 
cast  off.  Now,  as  between  the  external  and  internal 
evidence,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  the  latter  has  by 
far  the  greater  weight,  especially  as  the  external  evidence 
can,  perfectly  well,  be  read  in  a  different  sense.  The  Old 
Testament  promises  that  sacrifice  should  be  restored  may 
be  held  to  have  been  fulfilled  by  the  sacrificial  death  of 
Christ,  which  completed  and  filled  up  all  that  had  gone 
before.  In  that  case  the  evidence  that  sacrifice  and  ritual 
are  now  obsolete  for  Christians  is  left  standing  alone, 
and  the  Protestant  view  is  justified. 

And  the  case  for  this  view  is  strengthened  immeasur- 
ably by  observing  that  the  modern  sacerdotalism  has  taken 
up  as  essential  what  was  the  main  vice  of  sacrificial 
worship  in  the  old  economy.  That  was,  as  we  have  seen, 
the  tendency  to  rest  on  the  mere  performance  of  the 
external  rite,  without  reference  to  the  disposition  of  the 


270  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


heart  or  even  to  conduct.  Rivers  of  oil  and  hecatombs 
of  victims  were  thought  sufficient  to  meet  all  possible 
demands  on  God's  part,  and  against  this  the  polemic  of 
the  prophets  is  unceasing.  Now  in  almost  all  modern 
sacerdotalism  the  doctrine  of  the  efficacy  of  sacraments 
duly  administered,  apart  from  right  dispositions  in  either 
him  who  administers  them  or  in  him  who  receives  them, 
has  been  affirmed.  It  is  not  now,  as  it  was  in  the  "  old 
time,"  an  evil  tendency  which  had  to  be  assiduously 
fought  against,  but  which  could  not  be  overcome.  It  is 
openly  incorporated  in  the  orthodox  teaching,  and  is 
distinctly  provided  for  in  the  ideal  of  Christian  worship. 
That  marks  a  considerable  falling  away  from  the  pro- 
phetic ideal :  it  can  hardly  be  regarded  as  the  appointed 
end  of  that  great  religious  movement  which  the  prophets 
dominated  and  directed  for  so  long.  The  teaching  of 
Deuteronomy  certainly  is,  that  wherever  mere  external 
acts  are  supposed  to  have  power  to  secure  entrance  into 
the  spiritual  world  of  life  and  peace,  there  the  character 
of  God  is  misconceived  and  religion  degraded.  What  it 
demands  is  the  inward  and  spiritual  allegiance  of  faithful 
men  to  God.  What  it  depicts  as  the  essence  of  religious 
life  is  a  set  of  the  whole  nature  Godward,  as  deep  and 
irresistible  as  the  set  of  the  tides — 

"Such  a  tide  as  moving  seems  asleep, 
Too  full  for  sound  and  foam." 

Under  no  sacerdotal  system  can  that  view  be  unreservedly 
accepted,  and  therein  lies  the  condemnation  of  every  such 
system.  So  far  as  it  is  allowed  to  prevail,  the  force  of 
the  prophetic  polemic  has  to  be  ignored  or  evaded,  and  in 
greater  or  less  degree  the  same  spiritual  decay  which  the 
prophets  mourned  over  in  Israel  must  appear. 

But  it  is  not  only  where  trust  in  the  mere  opus  operatum 
is  theoretically  justified  that  it  makes  its  baleful  presence 


OLD   TESTAMENT  SACRIFICE  AND   CHRISTIANITY   271 

felt.  It  may  surreptitiously  creep  in  where  the  door  is 
theoretically  shut  against  it.  The  tendency  is  very  deep- 
seated  in  human  nature ;  and  many  evangelical  preachers, 
who  repudiate  all  sacramentarianism,  and  throw  the  full 
emphasis  of  Christian  religious  life  upon  grace  and  faith, 
yet  bring  back  again  in  subtler  shape  that  very  thing 
which  they  have  rejected.  For  example,  instead  of  the 
reception  of  the  sacrament  at  the  hands  of  ordained 
ministers,  a  man's  acceptance  with  God  is  sometimes  made 
to  depend  upon  a  declaration  of  belief  that  Christ  has  died 
for  him,  or  that  he  has  been  redeemed  and  saved  by  Christ. 
Wherever  such  statements  are  forced  upon  men,  there 
is  a  tendency  to  assume  that  a  decisive  step  in  the 
spiritual  Hfe  is  taken  by  the  mere  utterance  of  them.  The 
motives  which  actuate  the  utterer  are  taken  for  granted  ; 
the  existence  of  such  a  set  of  the  spiritual  nature  to  God 
as  Deuteronomy  demands  is  supposed  to  be  proved  by 
the  mere  spoken  words ;  and  men  who  cannot  or  will  not 
say  such  things  glibly  are  unchurched  without  mercy. 
What  is  that  but  the  opus  operatum  in  its  most  offensive 
shape  ?  But  in  whatever  shape  it  appears,  the  Deutero- 
nomic  demand  for  love  to  God,  with  the  heart  and  soul 
and  strength,  as  essential  to  all  true  spiritual  service 
and  sacrifice,  condemns  it.  Love  to  God  and  men  are 
the  main  things  in  true  religion.  All  else  is  subordinate 
and  secondary.  Sacrifice  and  ritual  without  these  are 
dead  forms.  That  is  the  Deuteronomic  teaching,  and  by 
it,  once  for  all,  the  true  relation  of  the  cultus  to  the  life 
is  fixed. 

Nevertheless  the  priestly  and  sacrificial  system  of  the 
Old  Testament  has  even  for  Christians  a  present  import- 
ance, for  it  is  an  adumbration  of  that  which  was  to  be 
done  in  the  death  of  Christ.  It  has  an  unspeakable  value, 
when  rightly  used,  as  an  object-lesson  in  the  elements 
which  are  essential  to  a  right  approach  to  a  Holy  God 


272  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

on  the  part  of  sinful  men.  Even  in  heathenism  there 
were  such  foreshadowings ;  and  nothing  is  more  fitted  to 
exalt  our  views  of  the  Divine  wisdom  than  to  trace,  as 
we  can  now  do,  the  ways  in  which  man's  seekings  after 
God,  even  beyond  the  bounds  of  the  chosen  people,  took 
forms  that  were  afterwards  absorbed  and  justified  in  the 
redeeming  work  of  our  Blessed  Lord.  For  example.  Pro- 
fessor Robertson  Smith  says  of  certain  ancient  heathen 
piacular  sacrifices,  ^*  The  dreadful  sacrifice  is  performed,  not 
with  savage  joy,  but  with  awful  sorrow,  and  in  the  mystic 
sacrifices  the  deity  himself  suffers  with  and  for  the  sins 
of  his  people  and  lives  again  in  their  new  life."  Now  if 
we  admit  that  he  is  not  unduly  importing  into  these 
sacrifices  ideas  which  are  really  foreign  to  them,  surely 
awe  is  the  only  adequate  emotion  wherewith  a  believer 
in  Christ  can  meet  such  a  strange  prophecy,  in  the  lowest 
religion,  of  that  which  is  deepest  in  the  highest.^  The 
sacrificial  S3'stem  in  general  was  founded,  in  part  at  least, 
on  belief  in  the  possibility  and  desirability  of  communion 
with  God.  In  the  sacrificial  feasts  this  was  supposed  to 
be  attained,  and  the  essential  religious  needs  of  mankind 
found  expression  in  much  of  the  ritual.  If  the  death 
of  the  god,  and  his  returning  to  life  again  in  his  people 
found  a  prominent  place  in  piacular  sacrifices  in  various 
lands,  that  suggests  that  in  some  dim  way  even  heathen 
men  had  learned  that  sin  cannot  be  removed  and  forgiven 
without  cost  to  God  as  well  as  to  man,  and  that  com- 
munion in  suffering  as  well  as  in  joy  is  a  necessary 
element  of  life  with  God.  The  human  heart,  Divinely 
biassed,  asserted  itself  in  effort  after  such  association  with 
Deity,  and  in  the  feeling  that  sin  was  that  element  in 
life  which  it  would  make  the  highest  demand  upon  the 
Divine  love  to  set  effectively  aside. 

'  Ency.  Bril.,  vol.  xxi.,  p.  138. 


OLD   TESTAMENT  SACRIFICE  AND   CHRISTIANITY   273 

But  if  such  preparation  for  the  fuhiess  of  the  time 
was  going  on  in  heathenism,  if  the  mind  and  heart  of 
man,  driven  forward  by  Divinely  ordered  experience  and 
its  own  needs,  could  produce  such  forecasts  in  the  ritual 
of  heathen  religion,  we  surely  must  admit  that  the  religious 
ritual  in  Israel  had  an  even  more  intimate  connection  with 
that  which  was  to  come.  For  we  claim  that  in  guiding 
the  destinies  of  Israel  God  was,  in  an  exceptional  manner, 
revealing  Himself,  that  among  them  He  established  the 
true  religion,  unfolded  it  in  their  history,  and  prepared  as 
nowhere  else  for  the  advent  of  Him  who  should  make 
real  and  objective  the  union  of  God  and  man.  Here  con- 
sequently, if  anywhere,  we  should  expect  to  find  the 
permanent  factors  in  religion  recognised  even  in  the 
forms  of  worship,  and  the  less  permanent  allowed  to 
fall  away.  We  should  also  expect  the  ritual  of  the  cultus 
to  grow  in  depth  of  meaning  with  time,  and  that  it  would 
more  and  more  recognise  the  moral  and  spiritual  elements 
in  life.  Finally,  we  should  expect  that  it  would  be  the 
parent  of  conceptions  rising  above  and  beyond  itself,  and 
more  fully  consonant  with  the  revelation  given  by  Christ 
than  anything  in  heathenism. 

Now  all  these  expectations  would  seem  to  have  been 
fulfilled ;  and  it  is  reasonable  to  assume  that  those  sacri- 
ficial ideas  which  corresponded  to  the  deepened  conscious- 
ness of  sin,  and  synchronised  apparently  with  the  decay 
of  Israel's  political  independence,  are  rightly  applied  to  the 
elucidation  of  the  meaning  of  Christ's  death.  Of  course 
mistakes  may  be  and  have  been  made  in  the  application 
of  this  principle ;  the  most  common  being  that  of  forcing 
every  detail  of  the  imperfect  and  temporary  provision  into 
the  interpretation  of  the  perfect  and  eternal.  Sometimes, 
too,  the  significance  of  the  life  and  coming  of  Christ  are 
obscured  by  a  too  exclusive  attention  to  His  sacrificial 
death.     But  the  principle  in  itself  must  be  sound,  if  Chris- 

18 


274  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

tianity  is  in  any  sense  to  be  regarded  as  the  completion  and 
full  development  of  the  Old  Testament  religion.  Besides 
the  immediate  significance  of  sacrifice  which  the  worship- 
pers perceived  and  by  which  they  were  edified,  there  was 
another  significance  which  belonged  to  it  as  a  step  in  the 
long  progress  which  had  been  marked  out  for  this  people 
in  the  Divine  purpose.  Regarded  from  that  standpoint, 
the  sacrifices,  and  the  ritual  connected  with  them,  had  a 
meaning  for  the  future  also,  were  in  fact  typical  of  the 
final  sacrifice  which  would  need  to  be  offered  only  once 
for  all.  How  much  of  this  was  understood  by  the  men 
of  ancient  Israel  we  have  no  means  of  knowing.  Some, 
doubtless,  had  a  faint  perception  of  it ;  but  at  its  clearest 
it  was  probably  more  a  dissatisfaction  with  what  they  had, 
leading  them  to  look  for  some  better  sacrifice,  than  any 
more  definite  understanding.  But  what  they  only  dinlly 
guessed  was,  as  we  can  now  see,  the  inner  meaning  of 
all ;  and  it  is  perfectly  legitimate  to  use  both  the  provisional 
and  the  perfected  revelations  to  explain  each  other.  On 
these  grounds  the  New  Testament  freely  makes  use  of 
the  ancient  ritual  to  bring  out  the  full  significance  of  the 
sacrifice  of  Christ. 

No  doubt  a  different  view  has  to  be  reckoned  with. 
Many  say  that  the  whole  of  this  typical  reference  is 
a  begging  of  the  question.  In  the  infancy  of  mankind 
sacrifice  was  a  natural  way  of  expressing  adoration  and  of 
seeking  the  favour  of  the  gods.  In  the  heathen  world  it 
reached  its  highest  manifestation  in  those  piacular  sacri- 
fices of  which  Robertson  Smith  speaks,  but  which  never- 
theless were  merely  an  outgrowth  of  Totemism.  In  Israel 
sacrifice  was  taken  up  by  the  religion  of  Yahweh  and 
embodied  in  it.  The  spiritual  forces  which  were  at  work 
in  that  nation  used  it  as  a  means  whereby  to  express 
themselves ;  and  when  Christ  came  to  complete  the  reve- 
lation, His^  purely  ethical  and  spiritual  work  was  unavoid- 


OLD   TESTAMENT  SACRIFICE  AND   CHRISTIANITY   275 

ably  expressed  in  sacrificial  terms.  But  that  is  no 
guarantee  that  the  essential  thing  in  the  work  of  Christ 
was  sacrifice.  On  the  contrary,  the  sacrificial  language 
used  about  it  is  of  no  real  importance.  It  is  simply  the 
natural  and  unavoidable  form  of  expression,  in  that  place 
and  at  that  time,  for  any  spiritual  deliverance.  In  short, 
had  there  been  really  nothing  sacrificial  in  the  death  of 
Christ,  the  religious  meaning  and  significance  of  it  would 
have  been  expressed  in  sacrificial  language,  for  no  other 
was  available.  Consequently  the  presence  of  such 
language  in  the  New  Testament  does  not  prove  that  the 
sacrificial  meaning  belongs  to  its  main  and  permanent 
significance.  The  sacrificial  idea,  on  this  view  of  things, 
belongs,  both  in  Israel  and  in  heathenism,  to  the  elements 
which  Christianity  superseded  and  did  away  with  ;  and 
it  is  consequently  an  anachronism  to  bring  it  in  to 
explain  and  elucidate  anything  done  or  taught  under  this 
new  dispensation. 

But  such  a  view  is  singularly  narrow,  and  unjust  to 
the  past.  It  surely  is  more  honouring  to  both  God  and 
man  to  suppose  that  the  capital  religious  ideas  of  the 
race,  those  ideas  which  have  been  everywhere  present 
and  have  been  seen  to  deepen  and  refine  with  every 
advance  man  has  made,  have  permanent  value.  More- 
over, on  any  view,  it  is  probable  that  in  them  the  essential 
religious  needs  of  human  nature  have  found  expression. 
If  so,  we  should  expect  that  they  would  in  the  end  be 
met,  and  that  the  perfect  religion,  when  it  did  come,  would 
not  ignore  but  satisfy  the  demand  which  the  nature  of 
man  and  the  providence  of  God  had  originated  and  com- 
bined to  strengthen.  Further,  it  is  the  very  essence  of 
the  Scriptural  view  of  Christ  that  He  perfected  and  carried 
to  their  highest  power  all  the  essential  features  in  the 
religious  constitution  of  Israel.  He  was  indeed  the  true 
Israel,  and  all  Israel's  tasks  fell  to  Him.     As    Prophet, 


276  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Priest,  and  Messianic  King  alike,  He  excelled  all  His 
predecessors,  who  were  what  they  were  only  because  they 
had,  in  their  degree,  done  part  of  the  work  which  He  was 
to  come  to  finish.  Apart  from  the  religion  of  the  Old 
Testament,  therefore,  Christ  is  unintelligible,  and  that, 
in  turn,  without  Him,  has  neither  a  progress  nor  a  goal. 
Belief  in  a  Divine  direction  of  the  world  would  in  itself 
be  sufficient  to  forbid  the  separation  of  one  from  the 
other.  If  so,  it  will  follow  that  the  sacrificial  idea  is 
essential  to  the  interpretation  of  our  Lord's  work.  That 
idea  grew  in  complexity  with  the  growth  of  the  higher 
religion.  It  was  at  its  deepest  when  religious  thought 
and  feeling  had  done  its  most  perfect  work ;  and  on  every 
principle  of  evolution  we  should  expect  that,  instead  of 
disappearing  at  the  next  stage,  it  would,  though  trans- 
formed, be  more  influential  than  ever.  It  is  so  if  Christ's 
death  is  regarded  from  the  point  of  view  of  sacrifice ; 
whereas,  if  that  is  laid  aside  Hke  a  worn-out  garment,  it  can 
never  have  been  anything  anywhere  but  an  excrescence 
and  a  superstition.  That  has  not  been  so ;  the  essential 
ideas  connected  with  sacrifice,  and  forgiveness  by  means  of 
it,  were  lessons  Divinely  taught  in  the  childhood  of  the 
world,  to  prepare  men  to  understand  the  Divinest  mystery 
of  history  when  it  should  be  manifested  to  the  world. 


CHAPTER   XVI 

LATVS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  AND   CUSTOMS 

Deut.  xiii.,  xiv. 

HAVING  thus  set  forth  the  law  which  was  to  crown 
and  complete  the  long  resistance  of  faithful  Israel 
to  idolatry,  our  author  goes  on  to  prohibit  and  to  decree 
punishment  for  any  action  likely  to  lead  to  the  worship 
of  false  gods.     He  absolutely  forbids  any  inquiry  into  the 
religions  of  the  Canaanites.     *'  Take  heed  to  thyself  that 
thou  inquire  not  after  their  gods,  saying,  How  do  these 
nations  serve  their  gods?  even    so  will   I   do  likewise." 
All  that  was  acceptable  to  Yahweh  was  included   in  the 
law  of  Israel,  and  beyond  that  they  were  on  no  account  to 
go  in  their  worship.     ''What    thing    soever  I  command 
you,  that   shall    ye   observe  to  do :  thou    shalt   not    add 
thereto  nor  diminish  from  it."     But  it  should  be  observed 
that  the  inquiry  here  forbidden  has  nothing  in  common 
with  the  scientific  inquiries  of  Comparative  Religion  in  our 
time.     Curiosity  of  that  kind,  supported  by  the  motive  of 
discovering  how  religion  had  grown,  was  unknown  at  that 
early  age  of  the  world,  probably  everywhere,  certainly  in 
Israel.     The  only  curiosity  powerful  enough  to  result  in 
action  then  was  that  which  tried  to  learn  how  the  ritual 
might  be  made  more  potent  in  its  influence  over  Yahweh 
by  gathering  attractive  features  from  every  known  religion. 
That   was    one    of    the    distinguishing    characteristics    of 
Manasseh's  reign.     The  Canaanite  religions,  the  religions 
of  Egypt  and  Assyria,  were  all  laid  under  contributioii ; 

?77 


278  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY. 


and  wherever  there  was  a  feature  which  promised 
additional  power  with  God  or  the  gods,  that  was  eagerly 
adopted.  Israel  had  lost  faith  in  Yahweh,  owing  to  the 
successes  of  Assyria.  In  unbelieving  terror  men  were 
wildly  grasping  at  any  means  of  safety.  They  worshipped 
Yahweh,  lest  He  should  do  them  harm,  but  they  joined 
with  Him  the  gods  of  their  foes,  to  secure  if  possible  their 
favour  also.  Inquiry  into  other  religions,  with  the  intent 
of  adopting  something  from  them  which  would  make  either 
Yahweh  or  the  strange  gods,  or  both,  propitious  to  them, 
was  rife.  Like  the  heathen  population  who  had  been 
transported  by  Assyria  into  the  territory  of  the  ten  tribes, 
men  ''  feared  Yahweh,  and  served  their  graven  images." 
All  that  is  here  sternly  condemned,  and  Judah  is  taught 
to  look  only  to  the  Divine  commands  for  effective  means 
of  approach  to  their  God.  The  prohibition,  therefore,  does 
not  import  mere  fanatical  opposition  to  knowledge.  It  is 
a  necessary  practical  measure  of  defence  against  idolatry  ; 
and  only  those  can  disapprove  of  it  who  are  incapable  of 
estimating  the  value  which  the  true  religion  in  its  Old 
Testament  shape  had  and  has  for  the  world.  To  preserve 
that  was  the  high  and  unique  calling  of  Israel.  Any 
narrowness,  real  or  supposed,  which  this  great  task 
imposed  upon  that  people,  is  amply  compensated  for  by 
their  guardianship  of  the  spiritual  life  of  mankind. 

But  if  inquiry  into  lower  religions  was  forbidden,  there 
could  be  nothing  but  the  sternest  condemnation  for  those 
who  had  inquired,  and  then  endeavoured  to  seduce  the 
chosen  people.  Deuteronomy,  therefore,  takes  three  typical 
cases — first,  seduction  by  one  who  was  respected  because 
of  high  religious  office,  then  seduction  by  one  who  had 
influence  because  of  close  bonds  of  natural  affection,  and 
lastly  that  of  a  community  which  would  be  likely  to  have 
influence  by  force  of  numbers — and  gives  inexorably  stern 
directions  how  such  evil  is  to  be  met,     There  can  be  little 


xiii.,xiv.]       LAIVS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  279 

doubt  that  the  cases  are  not  imaginary.  In  the  evil  days 
which  the  Deuteronomist  had  fallen  upon  they  were  pro- 
bably of  frequent  occurrence,  and  they  are,  consequently, 
provided  against  as  real  and  present  evils.  Naturally  the 
writer  takes  the  most  difficult  case  first.  If  an  Israelite 
prophet,  with  all  his  religious  prestige  as  a  confidant  of 
Yahweh,  and  still  more  with  the  prestige  of  successful 
prediction  in  his  favour,  shall  attempt  to  lead  men  to  join 
other  gods  to  Yahweh  in  their  worship — for  that  and  not 
rejection  of  Yahweh  for  the  exclusive  service  of  strange 
gods  is  almost  certainly  meant — then  they  were  not  to 
listen  to  him.  They  were  to  fall  back  upon  the  original 
principle  of  the  Mosaic  teaching  as  it  was  restated  in 
Deuteronomy,  that  Yahweh  alone  was  to  be  their  God. 
Some  lynx-eyed  critics  have  discovered  here  the  cloven 
hoof  of  legalism.  They  think  they  see  here  the  free  spirit 
of  prophecy,  to  which  untrammelled  initiative  was  the  very 
breath  of  fife,  subjected  to  the  bondage  of  written  law, 
and  so  doomed  to  death.  But  probably  such  a  mood  is 
unnecessarily  elegiac.  It  is  not  to  written  law  that  pro- 
phecy is  subjected  here.  It  is  the  actual  life-principle  of 
Yahwism  in  its  simplest  form  which  prophecy  is  required 
to  respect ;  that  is,  ultimately,  it  is  called  upon  simply  to 
respect  itself  Its  own  existence  depended  upon  faithful- 
ness to  Yahweh.  If  it  had  a  mission  at  all,  it  was  to 
proclaim  Him  and  to  declare  His  character.  If  it  had 
a  distinction  which  severed  it  from  mere  heathen  sooth- 
saying, it  was  that  it  had  been  raised  by  the  inspiration 
of  Yahweh  into  the  region  of  '^  the  true,  the  good,  the 
eternal,"  and  its  whole  power  lay  in  its  keeping  open  the 
communication  with  that  region.  It  is  therefore  only 
the  law  of  its  own  inner  being  to  which  prophecy  is  here 
bound ;  and  the  people  are  instructed  that,  whatever 
reputation  or  even  supernatural  power  it  might  have 
attained  to^  it  was  to  be  obeyed  only  when  true  to  itself 


28o  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

•and  to  the  faith.  Nothing  was  to  make  men  stagger  from 
that  foundation.  Not  even  the  working  of  miracles  was 
to  mislead  the  people,  for  only  on  the  plane  of  Yahweh's 
revelation  had  even  miracle  any  worth.  This  is  the  sound 
and  wholesome  doctrine  of  true  prophecy,  and  other 
utterances  on  the  subject  in  our  book  must  be  taken  in 
conjunction  with  it.  Religious  faithfulness,  not  foretelling, 
is  the  essence  of  it,  and  by  that  the  prophet  is  to  be 
inexorably  judged.  If  any  prophet,  therefore,  leads  men 
to  strange  gods,  his  character  and  his  powers  only  make 
him  more  dangerous  and  his  punishment  more  inexorable. 
**  That  prophet,  or  that  dreamer  of  dreams,  shall  be  put  to 
death."  He  comes  under  the  ban.  "  So  shalt  thou  put 
away  the  evil  from  the  midst  of  thee." 

Similarly,  when  family  ties  and  family  affection  are 
perverted  to  be  instruments  of  seduction,  they  are  to  be 
disregarded,  just  as  religious  reputation  and  miraculous 
power  were  to  be  set  aside.  If  a  brother,  or  a  son,  or  a 
daughter,  or  a  wife,  or  a  friend,  shall  secretly  entice  a  man 
to  **  serve  other  gods,"  then  he  shall  not  only  not  yield, 
but  he  must  slay  the  tempter.  It  is  characteristic  of  the 
Deuteronomist  that,  by  the  qualifications  of  the  various 
relationships  he  mentions,  he  should  show  his  sympathy 
and  his  insight  into  the  depths  of  both  family  affection 
and  friendship.  ''Thy  brother,  the  son  of  thy  mother," 
''  the  wife  of  thy  bosom,"  "  the  friend  which  is  as  thine 
own  soul,"  even  these,  near  as  they  are  to  thee,  must  be 
sacrificed  if  they  are  false  to  Israel  and  to  Israel's  God. 
Nay  more,  "  Thou  shalt  surely  kill  him  ;  thine  hand  shall 
be  upon  him  to  put  him  to  death,  and  afterwards  the 
hand  of  all  the  people,  and  thou  shalt  stone  him  with 
stones  that  he  die."  Upon  him,  too,  the  ban  shall  be 
laid. 

Nor,  finally,  shall  their  multitude  shield  those  who 
guffered   themselves  to   be  perverted,     If  a  city   should 


xiii.,  xiv.]        LAIVS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  281 

have  been  led  away  by  sons  of  Belial,  i.e.  by  worthless 
men,  to  worship  strange  gods,  then  the  whole  city  was 
to  be  put  to  the  ban.  It  was  to  be  immediately  stormed, 
every  living  creature  put  to  death,  and  all  the  spoil  of  it 
burnt  ^*  unto  Yahweh  their  God  "  ;  and  the  ruins  were  to 
be  a  "  mound  for  ever  " — that  is,  a  place  accursed.  Only 
on  these  terms  could  Yahweh  be  turned  away  from  the 
fierceness  of  His  anger  at  such  treason  and  unfaithful- 
ness among  His  people.  The  Canaanites  had  been  con- 
demned to  death  that  their  idolatries  and  vices  might  not 
corrupt  the  spiritual  faith  of  Israel.  There  was  no  other 
way,  if  the  treasure  which  had  been  committed  to  this 
nation  was  to  be  preserved.  As  Robertson  Smith  has 
said,  "  Experience  shows  that  primitive  religious  beliefs 
are  practically  indestructible  except  by  the  destruction 
of  the  race  in  which  they  are  engrained."  But  if  so,  it 
was  perhaps  even  more  necessary  that  idolaters  within 
Israel  should  be  also  extirpated.  We  may  think  the 
punishment  harsh ;  and  our  modern  doctrines  concerning 
toleration  can  by  no  ingenuity  be  brought  into  harmony 
with  it.  But  the  times  were  fierce,  and  men  were  not 
easily  restrained.  In  more  civilised  communities  ex- 
cessive severity  in  punishment  defeats  itself,  for  it  enlists 
sympathy  on  the  side  of  the  criminal.  But  among  a 
people  like  the  Hebrews,  probably  severity  succeeded 
where  mercy  would  have  been  flouted.  In  India  our 
administrators  have  had  to  confess  that  the  horrible  reck- 
lessness and  severity  of  punishment  in  the  Mahratta 
states  of  the  old  type  suppressed  crime  as  the  infinitely 
more  just  and  better  organised  but  milder  British  police 
organisations  could  not  then  do.  ^*  Probably  the  success 
of  barbarous  methods  of  repressing  crime  is  best  ex- 
plained by  their  origin  in  and  close  connection  with  a 
primitive  state  of  society.  Because  punishments  were 
inhuman,  they  struck  terror  where  no  other  motive  would 


282  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

deter  from  crime."  ^     In  other  and  Scriptural  words,  the 
hardness  of  men's  hearts  made  such  harshness  unavoidable. 

Taking  the  whole  of  this  thirteenth  chapter  into  con- 
sideration, therefore,  we  see  how  high  and  severe  were  the 
demands  which  Old  Testament  religion,  as  taught  in 
Deuteronomy,  made  upon  its  votaries.  It  presupposes  on 
the  part  of  the  people  an  insight  into  the  fundamentally 
spiritual  nature  of  their  faith  entirely  unobscured  by  ritual 
and  sacrifice.  They  were  expected  to  pass  beyond  the 
teachings  of  accredited  spiritual  guides,  beyond  even  the 
evidence  of  supernatural  power,  and  to  test  all  by  the 
moral  and  spiritual  truth,  once  delivered  to  them  by 
prophet  and  by  miracle,  and  now  a  secure  possession. 
Spiritual  truth  received  and  lived  by  is  thus  set  above 
everything  else  as  the  test  and  the  judge  of  all.  Other 
things  were  merely  ladders  by*  which  men  had  been 
brought  to  the  truth  in  religion.  Once  there,  nothing 
should  move  them ;  and  any  further  guidance  which  pur- 
ported to  come  from  even  the  heavenly  places  was  to  be 
tried  and  accepted,  only  if  it  corroborated  the  fundamental 
truths  already  received  and  attested  by  experience  in 
actual  life.  Loyalty  to  ascertained  truth,  that  is,  is  greater 
than  loyalty  to  teachers,  or  to  that  which  seems  to  be 
supernatural ;  and  the  chief  power  for  which  a  prophet 
is  to  be  reverenced  is  not  that  by  which  he  gives  a  true 
forecast  of  the  future,  but  that  which  impels  him  to  speak 
the  truth  about  God. 

Even  at  this  day,  and  for  believers  in  Christ,  after  all 
the  teaching  and  experience  of  eighteen  Christian  cen- 
turies, this  is  a  high,  almost  an  unattainable,  standard  to 
set  up.  Even  to-day  it  is  thought  an  advanced  position 
that  miracles  as  a  security  for  truth  are  subordinate  and 
inferior  to  the  light  of  the  truth  itself  as  exhibited  in  the 

'  Tupper  Our  Indian  Protectorate,  p.  248, 


xiii.,xiv.]       LAWS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  283 

lives  of  faithful  men.  Yet  that  is  precisely  what  the 
Deuteronomist  teaches.  He  has  no  doubt  about  miracles. 
He  regards  them  as  being  Divinely  sent,  even  when  they 
might  be  made  use  of  to  mislead ;  but  he  calls  upon  his 
people  to  disregard  them  if  they  seem  to  point  towards 
unfaithfulness  to  God.  Their  supreme  trust  is  to  be  that 
Yahweh  cannot  deny  Himself.  If  he  seem  to  do  so  by 
giving  the  sanction  of  miracle  to  teaching  which  denies 
Him,  that  is  only  to  prove  men,  to  know  whether  they 
love  Yahweh  their  God  with  all  their  heart  and  with  all 
their  soul.  The  inner  certainty  of  those  who  have  had 
communion  with  Yahweh  is  to  override  everything  else. 
"  Whosoever  loves  God  with  a  pure  heart,"  says  Calvin, 
*^  is  armed  with  the  invincible  power  of  the  Divine  Spirit, 
that  he  should  not  be  ensnared  by  falsehoods."  ^  This 
has  always  been  the  confidence  of  religious  reformers  who 
have  had  real  power.  Luther,  for  example,  took  his 
stand  upon  the  New  Testament  and  his  own  personal 
experience ;  and  by  what  he  knew  of  God  he  judged  all 
that  the  most  venerable  tradition,  and  the  authority  of 
the  Church,  and  the  examples  of  saintly  men  claimed  to 
set  forth  as  binding  upon  him.  ''  Here  stand  I  :  I  can 
do  no  other  :  God  help  me."  He  felt  that  he  had  hold 
of  the  heart  of  the  revelation  of  God  as  it  was  made  in 
Christ,  and  he  rejected,  without  scruple,  whatever  in  itself 
or  in  its  results  contradicted  or  obscured  that.  Inspired 
and  upheld  by  this  consciousness,  he  faced  a  hostile 
world  and  a  raging  Church  with  equanimity.  It  is  always 
so  that  abuses  have  been  removed  and  innovations  that 
are  hurtful  warded  off  in  the  Church  of  God. 

But  there  is  a  difficulty  here.  As  against  the  historical 
examples  which  show  how  much  good  may  be  wrought 
by  this    unshaken   mind  when  accompanied  by  adequate 

'  Commcntaty  on  Pentateuch^  vol.  i.,  p.  448, 


284  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

insight,  many,  perhaps  even  more,  instances  can  be  ad- 
duced where  unbending  assertion  of  individual  conviction 
has  led  to  fanaticism  and  irreligion ;  or,  as  has  even  more 
frequently  been  the  case,  has  blinded  men's  eyes,  and 
made  them  resist  with  immovable  obstinacy  teachings  on 
which  the  future  of  religion  depended.  On  the  altar  of 
uncompromising  fidelity  to  the  letter  of  the  faith  delivered 
to  them,  men  in  all  ages  have  offered  up  love  and  gentle- 
ness and  fairness,  and  that  open  mind  to  which  alone 
God  can  speak.  How  then  can  they  be  sure,  when  they 
disregard  their  teachers  and  defy  even  signs  from  heaven, 
that  they  are  really  only  holding  up  the  banner  of  faith 
in  an  evil  day,  and  are  not  hardening  themselves  against 
God  ?  The  answer  is  that,  since  the  matter  concerns 
the  spiritual  life,  there  are  no  clear,  mechanical  dividing 
lines  which  can  be  pointed  out  and  respected.  Nothing 
but  spiritual  insight  can  teach  a  man  what  the  absolutely 
essential  and  the  less  essential  elements  of  religion  are. 
Nothing  else  can  give  him  that  power  of  distinguishing 
great  things  from  small  which  here  is  of  such  cardinal  im- 
portance. Probably  the  nearest  approach  to  effective  guid- 
ance may  be  found  in  this  principle,  that  when  all  points  in 
a  man's  faith  are  to  him  equally  important,  when  he  frets 
as  much  in  regard  to  divergence  from  his  own  religious 
practices  as  in  regard  to  denial  of  the  faith  altogether,  he 
must  certainly  be  wrong.  Such  a  temper  must  necessarily 
resist  all  change;  and  since  progress  is  as  much  a  law  in 
the  rehgious  life  as  in  any  other,  it  must  be  found  at 
times  fighting  against  God.  Otherwise,  stagnation  would 
be  the  test  of  truth,  and  the  principles  of  the  Christian  faith 
would  be  branded  as  so  shallow  and  so  easily  exhausted, 
that  their  whole  significance  could  be  seized  and  set 
forth  at  once  by  the  generation  which  heard  the  apostles. 
That  was  far  from  being  the  case.  The  post-apostolic 
Church,  for  instance,  did  not   understand   St,   Paul,     It 


xiii.,xiv.]        LAWS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  285 

turned  rather  to  the  simpler  ideas  of  the  mass  of  Christians, 
and  elaborated  its  doctrines  almost  entirely  on  that  basis. 
During  the  centuries  since  then  many  lessons  of  unspeak- 
able value  have  been  learned  by  the  Christian  world. 
The  Church  has  been  enriched  by  the  thoughts  and 
teachings  of  multitudes  of  men  of  genius.  The  pro- 
vidential chances  and  changes  of  all  these  centuries  have 
immensely  widened  and  deepened  Christian  experience. 
Stagnation  consequently  cannot  be  made  the  test  of 
Christian  truth.  We  must  be  open  to  new  light  on  the 
meaning  of  Divine  revelation,  or  we  fail  altogether,  as  the 
Israelites  would  have  done  had  they  refused  to  accept  the 
teaching  of  any  prophet  after  the  first.  This  much  may, 
however,  be  said  on  the  affirmative  side,  that  when  a 
man  has  thoughtfully  and  prayerfully  decided  that  the 
central  element  of  his  faith  is  attacked,  he  cannot  but 
resist,  and  if  he  is  faithful  he  will  resist  in  the  spirit  of 
the  passage  we  are  discussing.  His  assertion  of  his 
individual  conviction,  even  if  it  be  mistaken,  will  do  little 
harm.  Time  will  be  in  favour  of  the  truth.  But  mis- 
take will  be  rare,  indeed,  when  men  are  taught  to  assert 
in  this  manner  only  the  things  by  which  the  soul  lives, 
when  only  the  actual  channels  of  communion  with  God 
are  thus  defended  to  the  uttermost.  These  any  thoughtful 
patient  man  who  looks  for  and  yields  to  the  guidance  of 
the  Holy  Spirit  of  Christ  will  almost  infallibly  recognise, 
and  by  these  he  will  take  his  stand,  for  he  can  do  no 
other. 

But  precautions  against  idolatry  are  not  exhausted  by 
the  war  declared  upon  men  who  might  attempt  to  lead 
the  Israelite  into  evil.  Besides  insidious  human  enemies, 
there  were  also  insidious  customs  originating  in  heathenism, 
and  still  redolent  of  idolatry  even  when  they  were  severed 
from  any  overt  connection  with  it.  Ancient  rituals, 
ancient    superstitions,    hateful   remnants    of  bloodthirsty 


286  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

pagan  rites,  were  being  revived  in  the  Deuteronomist's 
day  on  every  hand,  because  faith  in  the  higher  reUgion 
that  had  superseded  them  had  been  shaken.  Like  streams 
from  hidden  reservoirs  suddenly  reopened,  idolatrous  and 
magical  practices  were  overflowing  the  land,  and  were 
finding  in  popular  customs,  harmless  in  better  days, 
channels  for  their  return  into  the  life  of  those  who  had 
formerly  risen  above  them. 

Some  of  these  were  more  hurtful  than  others,  and  two 
are  singled  out  at  the  beginning  of  chapter  xiv.  as  those 
which  a  people  holy  unto  Yahweh  must  specially  avoid  : 
"Ye  shall  not  cut  yourselves,  nor  make  any  baldness 
between  your  eyes  for  the  dead."  The  grounds  for  avoid- 
ing these  practices  are  first  given,  and  we  may  probably 
assume  that  they  are  the  grounds  also  for  the  other 
enactments  which  follow.  They  are  these  :  **  Ye  are  the 
children  of  Yahweh  your  God,"  and  '^  Thou  art  a  holy 
people  unto  Yahweh  thy  God,  and  Yahweh  hath  chosen 
thee  to  be  a  peculiar  people  unto  Himself,  out  of  all 
peoples  that  are  upon  the  face  of  the  earth."  The  last 
of  these  reasons  is  common  to  the  Exodus  code  with 
Deuteronomy,  and  comes  even  more  prominently  into 
view  in  the  Levitical  law.  Just  as  Yahweh  alone  was  to 
be  their  God,  they  alone  were  to  be  Yahweh's  people,  and 
they  were  to  be  holy  to  Him,  ix.  were  to  separate  them- 
selves to  Him ;  for  in  its  earhest  meaning  to  be  holy  is 
simply  to  be  separate  to  Yahweh.  This  whole  dispensation 
of  law,  that  is,  was  meant  to  separate  the  people  of 
Israel  from  the  idolatrous  world,  and  in  this  separation 
we  have  the  key  to  much  that  would  otherwise  be  hard 
to  comprehend.  Looked  at  from  the  point  of  view  of 
revelation,  petty  details  about  tonsure,  about  clean  and 
unclean  animals,  and  so  on,  seem  incredibly  unworthy; 
and  many  have  said  to  themselves,  How  can  the  God  of 
the   whole   earth   have   really  been   the   author  of  laws 


xiii.,xiv.]        LAIVS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  287 

dealing  with  such  trivialities  ?  But  when  we  regard  these 
as  provisions  intended  to  secure  the  separation  of  the 
chosen  people,  they  assume  quite  another  aspect.  Then 
we  see  that  they  had  to  be  framed  in  contrast  to  the 
idolatries  of  the  surrounding  nations,  and  are  not  meant  to 
have  further  spiritual  or  moral  significance. 

But  the  first  reason  given  is  a  higher  and  more  im- 
portant one,  which  occurs  here  for  the  first  time  in 
Deuteronomy :  "Ye  are  the  children  of  Yahweh  your 
God."  In  heathen  lands  such  a  title  of  honour  was 
common,  because  physically  most  worshippers  of  false 
gods  were  regarded  as  their  children.  But  in  Israel, 
where  such  physical  sonship  would  have  been  rejected 
with  horror  as  impairing  the  Divine  holiness,  the  spiritual 
sonship  was  asserted  of  the  individual  much  more  slowly. 
In  Yahweh's  command  to  Moses  to  threaten  Pharaoh 
with  the  death  of  his  firstborn  son,  and  in  Hosea  xi.  i, 
Israel  collectively  is  called  Yahweh's  firstborn  and 
His  son.  In  Hosea  i.  10  it  is  prophesied  that  in  the 
Messianic  time,  '*  in  the  place  where  it  was  said  unto  them. 
Ye  are  not  My  people,  it  shall  be  said  unto  them.  Ye  are 
the  sons  of  the  living  God."  But  here  for  the  first  time 
this  high  title  is  bestowed  upon  the  actual  individual 
Israehtes.  It  was  perhaps  imphed  in  the  Deuteronomist's 
view  of  God's  fatherly  treatment  of  the  nation  in  the  desert, 
and  still  more  in  his  demand  for  the  love  of  the  individual 
heart.  Yet  only  here  is  it  brought  plainly  forth  as 
a  ground  for  the  regulation  of  life  according  to  Yahweh's 
commands.  Each  son  of  Israel  is  also  a  son  of  God ;  and 
by  none  of  his  acts  or  habits  should  he  bring  disgrace 
upon  his  spiritual  Father.  Likeness  to  God  is  expected 
and  demanded  of  him.  It  is  his  function  in  the  world  to 
represent  Him,  to  give  expression  to  the  Divine  character 
in  all  his  ways.  This  is  the  Israelite's  high  calling,  and 
the  religious  application  of  noblesse  oblige  to  such  matters 


288  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

as  follow,  gives  a  dignity  and  importance  to  all  of  them 
such  as  in  their  own  nature  they  could  hardly  claim. 

"Ye  shall  not  cut  yourselves,  nor  make  any  baldness 
between  your  eyes  for  the  dead."  Israel  was  not  to 
express  grief  for  the  dead  in  these  ways,  first  because 
that  was  the  custom  of  other  nations,  and  secondly  still 
more  because  the  origin  and  meaning  of  such  rites  was 
idolatrous,  and  as  such  altogether  unworthy  of  Yahweh's 
sons.  "  Both,"  says  Robertson  Smith,  ''  occur  not  only 
in  mourning,  but  in  the  worship  of  the  gods,  and  belong 
to  the  sphere  of  heathen  superstition."  ^  Elsewhere  he 
explains  the  cutting  of  themselves  to  be  the  making  of 
a  blood  covenant  with  the  dead,  just  as  the  priests  of 
Baal  in  their  worship  tried  to  get  their  god  to  come  to 
their  help  by  making  a  covenant  of  blood  with  him 
at  his  altar.^  This  naturally  tended  to  bring  in  the 
superstitions  of  necromancy,  and  opened  the  way  also  for 
the  worship  of  the  dead.  Many  traces  of  its  previous 
existence  among  the  Israelite  tribes  are  to  be  found  in 
the  Scriptures ;  and  the  probability  is  that  as  ancestor- 
worship  ruled  the  life  and  shaped  the  thoughts  of  Greeks 
and  Romans  till  Christianity  appeared,  so  Yahwism  alone 
had  broken  its  power  over  Israel.  But  such  superstitions 
die  hard,  and  in  the  general  recrudescence  of  almost  for- 
gotten forms  of  heathenism  at  this  time,  this  cult  may  very 
well  have  been  reasserting  itself  As  for  the  shaving  of  the 
front  part  of  the  head,  that  had  a  precisely  similar  import. 
"It  had  exactly  the  same  sense  as  the  offering  of  the 
mourner's  blood."  ^  "  When  the  hair  of  the  living  is  de- 
posited with  the  dead,  and  the  hair  of  the  dead  remains  with 
the  hving,  a  permanent  bond  of  connection  unites  the  two." 

The  prohibition  as  food  of  the  animals  and  birds  called 

'  The  Old  Testament  in  the  Jewish  Chioxh,  p.  366. 
^  Religion  of  the  Semites,  p.  304. 
^  Ibid.,  p.  306. 


xiii.,  xiv.]        LAIVS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  289 

"  unclean  "  was  another  measure  obviously  of  the  same 
nature  as  the  prohibition  of  heathen  mourning  practices ; 
but  in  its  details  it  is  more  difficult  to  explain.  Probabty, 
however,  it  was  a  more  potent  instrument  of  separation 
than  any  other.  In  India  to-day  the  gulf  between 
the  flesh-eater  and  the  orthodox  vegetarian  Hindu  is 
utterly  impassable ;  and  in  the  east  of  Europe  and  in 
Palestine,  where  the  Jewish  restrictions  as  to  food  are 
still  regarded,  the  orthodox  Jew  is  separated  from  all 
Gentiles  as  by  a  wall.  In  travelling  he  never  appears 
at  meals  with  his  fellow-travellers.  All  the  food  he 
requires  he  carries  with  him  in  a  basket ;  and  at  every 
place  where  he  stops  it  is  the  duty  of  the  Jewish  community 
to  supply  him  with  proper  food,  that  he  may  not  be 
tempted  to  defile  himself  with  anything  unclean.  But 
it  is  very  difficult  for  us  now  to  bring  the  individual 
prohibitions  under  one  head,  and  it  seems  impossible  to 
explain  them  from  any  one  point  of  view. 

Some  of  the  animals  and  birds  prohibited  were  prob- 
ably, then,  animals  eaten  in  connection  with  idolatrous 
feasts  by  the  neighbouring  heathen.  Isa.  Ixv.  4  shows 
that  swine's  flesh  was  eaten  at  sacrificial  meals  by 
idolaters,  and  from  the  expression  *'  broth  of  abominable 
things  is  in  their  vessels"  it  is  clear  that  the  flesh  of 
other  animals  was  so  used.  All  these  would  necessarily 
be  prohibited  to  Israel ;  but  beyond  a  few,  such  as  the 
swine,  which  was  sacrificed  to  Tammuz  or  Adonis,  and 
the  mouse  and  the  wild  ass,  we  have  no  means  of  knowing 
what  they  were.  That  this  is  a  vera  causa  of  such 
prohibitions  is  shown  by  the  facts  mentioned  by  Professor 
Robertson  Smith,  that  "  Simeon  Stylites  forbade  his 
Saracen  converts  to  eat  the  flesh  of  the  camel,  which  was 
the  chief  element  in  the  sacrificial  meals  of  the  Arabs, 
and  our  own  prejudice  against  the  use  of  horse-flesh  is 
a  relic  of  an  old  ecclesiastical  prohibition  framed  at  the 

19 


290  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

time  when  the  eating  of  such  food  was  an  act  of  worship 
to  Odin."  The  very  ancient  and  stringent  prohibition 
of  blood  as  an  article  of  diet  is  probably  to  be  accounted 
for  in  this  way  also.  Blood  was  eaten  at  heathen 
sacrificial  feasts;  without  other  reason  that  would  be 
sufficient.  These  are  the  general  lines  which  must  have 
determined  the  Hst  of  clean  animals  in  the  view  of  the 
lawgiver,  since  he  brings  them  in  under  the  head  of 
idolatry  and  under  the  two  general  grounds  we  have 
discussed  (p.  289,  supra). 

Jewish  writers,  however,  especially  since  Maimonides, 
have  regarded  these  prohibitions  as  aiming  primarily  at 
sanitary  ends,  and  as  a  proof  of  their  efficacy  have  adduced 
the  unusually  high  average  health  of  the  Jews,  and  their 
almost  complete  exemption  from  certain  classes  of  disease. 
No  such  point  of  view  is  suggested  in  the  Scriptures 
themselves,  for  it  would  surely  be  rather  farfetched  to 
class  possible  disease  as  an  infringement  of  the  holiness 
demanded  of  Israel,  or  as  a  thing  unworthy  of  Yahweh's 
sons.  Nevertheless  a  general  view  of  the  list  of  clean 
animals  here  given  would  support  the  idea  that  sanitary 
considerations  also  had  something  to  do  with  the  classifica- 
tion. The  practical  effect  of  the  rule  laid  down  is  to 
exclude  all  the  carnivora  among  quadrupeds,  and  so  far 
as  we  can  interpret  the  nomenclature,  the  raptores  among 
birds.^  '^Amongst  fish,  those  which  were  allowed  contain 
unquestionably  the  most  wholesome  varieties."  Further, 
the  nations  of  antiquity  which  developed  such  categories 
of  clean  and  unclean  animals  seem  in  the  main  to  have 
taken  the  same  line.  The  ground  of  this  probably  is  the 
natural  disgust  with  which  unclean  feeders  are  always 
regarded.  Animals  and  birds  especially  which  feed,  or 
may  be  supposed   to.  feed,    on   carrion,  are   everywhere 

'  Smith's  Dictionary  of  the  Bible,  vol.  iii.  p.  IS^Q- 


xiii.,  xiv.]        LAIVS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  291 

disliked,  and  as  a  rule  they  are  unsuitable  for  food. 
Grass-eating  animals,  on  the  other  hand,  are  always 
regarded  as  clean.  Scaleless  fish,  too,  are  generally  more 
or  less  slimy  to  the  touch,  and  with  them  reptiles  are  alto- 
gether forbidden.  All  this  seems  to  show  that  a  natural 
sentiment  of  disgust,  for  whatever  reason  felt,  was  active 
in  the  selection  of  the  animals  marked  unclean  by  men  of 
every  race.  The  pre-Mosaic  customary  law  on  this  sub- 
ject would,  of  course,  have  this  characteristic  in  common 
with  similar  laws  of  primitive  nations.  When  the  worship 
of  Yahweh  was  introduced,  most  of  this  would  be  taken 
over,  only  such  modifications  being  introduced  as  the 
higher  religion  demanded.  In  some  main  elements, 
therefore,  the  Mosaic  law  on  this  subject  would  be  a 
repetition  of  what  is  to  be  found  elsewhere.  Henqe  a 
general  tendency  to  health  may  be  expected  ;  for  besides 
the  guidance  which  healthy  disgust  would  give,  a  long 
experience  must  also  have  been  registered  in  such  laws. 
The  influence  of  them  in  promoting  health  has  recently 
been  acknowledged  by  the  Lancet ;  and  though  that  reason 
for  observing  them  is  not  mentioned  in  Scripture,  we  may 
view  it  as  a  proof  that  the  Jewish  legislators  were  under 
an  influence  which  brought  them,  perhaps  even  when  they 
knew  it  not,  into  relation  with  what  was  wholesome  in 
the  practices  and  customs  of  their  place  and  time. 

Beyond  these  three  reasons  for  the  laws  regarding 
food,  all  is  the  wildest  speculation.  If  other  reasons 
underlie  these  laws,  we  cannot  now  ascertain  what  they 
were.  For  a  time  it  was  the  custom  to  ascribe  the  Jewish 
laws  to  Persian  influence,  though  from  the  nature  of  the 
case  such  laws  must  have  been  part  of  the  heritage  of 
Israel  from  pre-Mosaic  time.  Even  to-day  Jewish  writers 
ascribe  them  to  the  evil  effect  which  bad  food  has  upon 
the  soul,  either  by  infecting  it  with  the  characteristics  of 
the   unclean  beasts,  or  by  rendering  it  impenetrable  to 


292  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

good  influences.^  But,  as  usual,  it  is  the  allegorical  inter- 
preters who  carry  oflf  the  palm.  Animals  that  chew  the 
cud  V\^ere  to  be  eaten,  because  they  symbolised  those  who 
*'  read,  mark,  learn,  and  inwardly  digest  "  the  Divine  law  : 
those  which  divide  the  hoof  are  examples  of  those  who 
distinguish  between  good  and  bad  actions;  and  in  the 
ostrich  one  interpreter  finds  an  analogue  to  the  bad 
commentators  who  pervert  the  words  of  Holy  Scripture. 

Hitherto  in  chapter  xiv.  we  have  been  dealing  with 
material  to  which  a  parallel  can  be  found  only  in  the  small 
code  of  laws  contained  in  Lev.  xvii. — xxvi.,  commonly 
called  the  Law  of  Holiness,  and  in  the  Priestly  Code.^  But 
the  two  remaining  directions  regarding  food,  which  are 
contained  in  the  twenty-first  verse  are  parallel  to  prohibi- 
tions in  the  Law  of  the  Covenant.  The  first,  "  Ye  shall  not 
eat  of  anything  that  dieth  of  itself  ...  for  thou  art  an  holy 
people  unto  Yahweh  thy  God,"  is  parallel  to  Exod.  xxii.  31. 
"  And  ye  shall  be  holy  men  unto  Me  :  therefore  ye  shall 
not  eat  any  flesh  that  is  torn  of  beasts  in  the  field,"  and  to 
Lev.  xvii,  15,  ''Every  soul  that  eateth  that  which  dieth 
of  itself,  or  that  which  is  torn  of  beasts,  whether  he  be 
homeborn  or  a  stranger,  he  shall  wash  his  clothes,  and 
bathe  himself  in  water,  and  be  unclean  until  the  evening." 
The  ground  for  prohibiting  such  food,  was,  of  course,  that 
the  blood  was  in  it.  But  there  is  a  divergence  between 
the  parallel  laws,  which  is  seen  clearly  when  we  take 
into  account  the  destination  of  the  flesh  of  the  animal 
so  dying.  In  Exodus  it  is  said,  "  To  the  dogs  shall  ye 
cast  it."  In  Deuteronomy  the  command  is,  "  To  the 
stranger  within  thy  gates  ye  shall  give  it,  and  he  shall 
eat  of  it,  or  ye  may  sell  it  unto  a  foreigner."     In  Leviticus 

^  Dillmann,  Deuteronomy,  p.  483. 

"^  This,  of  course,  does  not  show  that  P  must  have  been  known  to  D, 
but  it  proves  that  as  regards  material  P  and  D  have  drawn  from  the 
same  source,  and  that  older  documents,  or  customs  at  least,  underlie  both. 


xiii.,xiv.]        LAIVS  AGAINST  IDOLATROUS  ACTS  293 

it  is  taken  for  granted  that  an  Israelite  and  also  a  stranger 
may  eat  either  of  the  nebhelahj  that  which  dieth  of  itself, 
or  the  terephahy  that  which  is  torn  ;  and  if  either  do  so 
it  is  prescribed  only  that  he  should  wash,  and  should  be 
unclean  until  the  evening. 

Here,  therefore,  we  have  one  of  the  cases  in  which  the 
traditional  hypothesis — that  the  Law  of  the  Covenant  was 
given  at  Sinai  when  Israel  arrived  there,  the  laws  of  the 
Priestly  Code  probably  not  many  weeks  after,  and  the 
code  of  Deuteronomy  only  thirty-eight  or  thirty-nine  years 
later,  but  before  the  laws  had  come  fully  into  effect  by  the 
occupation  of  Canaan — raises  a  difficulty.  Why  should 
the  Sinaitic  law  say  that  terephah  is  not  to  be  eaten  by 
any  one,  but  cast  to  the  dogs,  and  the  Levitical  law  in  so 
short  a  time  after  make  the  eating  of  that  and  nebhelah 
mere  cause  of  subordinate  uncleanness  to  both  Israelite 
and  stranger,  while  Deuteronomy  permits  the  Israelite 
either  to  give  the  nebhelah  to  the  stranger  that  he  may 
eat  it,  or  to  make  it  an  article  of  traffic  with  the  foreigner  ? 
Keil's  explanation  is  certainly  feasible,  that  in  Exodus  we 
have  the  law,  in  Leviticus  the  provision  for  accidental, 
or  perhaps  wilful,  disobedience  of  it  under  the  pressure 
of  hunger,  while  in  Deuteronomy  we  have  a  permission 
to  sell,  lest  on  the  plea  of  waste  the  law  might  be  ignored. 
But  the  position  of  the  ^^ ger"  or  stranger,  is  not  ac- 
counted for.  In  Leviticus  he  is  bound  to  the  worship  of 
Yahweh,  and  can  no  more  eat  nebhelah  or  terephah  than 
the  native  Israelite  can,  while  in  Deuteronomy  he  is  on 
a  lower  stage  than  the  Israelite  as  regards  ceremonial 
cleanness,  and  much  on  the  same  level  as  the  nokhri,  the 
foreigner,  who  in  Deuteronomy  is  dealt  wath  as  an  inferior, 
not  bound  to  the  same  scrupulosity  as  the  Israelite 
(Deut.  XV.  3,  23,  29).  There  does  not  appear  to  be  any 
explanation  of  such  a  change  in  less  than  forty  years ; 
more  especially  as  the  moment  at  which  the  change  would 


294  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

on  that  hypothesis  be  made  was  precisely  the  moment 
when  the  stranger  was  about  for  the  first  time  to  become 
an  important  element  in  Israelite  life.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  order  of  the  codes  be  Exodus,  Deuteronomy, 
Leviticus,  then  the  Exodus  law,  which  does  not  consider  the 
stranger,  would  suit  the  earliest  stage  of  Israel's  history, 
when  the  stranger  would  generally  be  a  spy.  Later,  he 
crept  into  Israelite  life,  and  gradually  received  more  and 
more  consideration ;  especially  in  the  days  of  Solomon, 
when  the  Chronicler  estimates  the  number  of  the  strangers 
at  over  a  hundred  and  fifty  thousand.  But  he  was  not 
recognised  at  that  stage  as  fully  bound  to  all  an  Israelite's 
duties,  or  as  possessed  of  all  an  Israelite's  privileges,  and 
that  is  precisely  the  position  he  occupies  in  Deuteronomy. 
In  the  Priestly  Code,  however,  at  a  time  when  the  stranger 
had  practically  become  a  proselyte,  the  ideal  Kingdom  of 
God  includes  the  "stranger,"  and  gives  him  a  position  which 
differs  little  from  that  of  the  homeborn.  That  would  make 
these  different  laws  answer  to  different  periods  of  Israel's 
history,  and  would  coincide  with  what  has  been  otherwise 
found  to  be  the  order  of  Israel's  legal  development. 

The  second  prohibition,  v/hich  runs  parallel  to  what 
we  find  in  Exodus,  is  the  somewhat  enigmatical  one 
that  a  kid  should  not  be  sodden  in  its  mother's  milk. 
What  it  was  in  this  act  which  made  it  seem  necessary 
to  issue  such  a  command  cannot  now  be  ascertained  with 
any  certainty.  Most  probably  it  was  connected  in  some 
way  with  heathen  ceremonies,  perhaps  at  a  harvest  feast ; 
for,  as  we  have  seen,  it  is  a  ruling  motive  throughout  all 
this  section  that  the  Israelites  should  reject  everything 
which  among  their  neighbours  was  connected  with 
idolatry. 


CHAPTER   XVII 

THE  SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD— I.    THE  KING 
Deut.  xvii.  14-20 

IN  approaching  the  main  section  of  the  legislation  it 
will  be  necessary,  in  accordance  with  the  expository 
character  of  the  series  to  which  this  volume  belongs,  to 
abandon  the  consecutive  character  of  the  comment.  It 
would  lead  us  too  far  into  archaeology  to  discuss  the 
meaning  and  origin  of  all  the  legal  provisions  which 
follow.  Moreover  nothing  short  of  an  extensive  com- 
mentary would  do  them  justice,  and  for  our  purpose  we 
must  endeavour  to  group  the  prescriptions  of  the  code, 
and  discuss  them  so.  As  it  stands  there  is  no  arrange- 
ment traceable.  So  utterly  without  order  is  it,  that  it  can 
hardly  be  thought  that  it  is  in  the  exact  shape  in  which 
it  left  its  author's  hands.  Transpositions  and  misplace- 
ments must,  one  thinks,  have  taken  place  to  some  extent. 
We  are  thus  left  free  to  make  our  own  arrangements,  and 
it  would  appear  most  fitting  to  discuss  the  code  under  the 
five  heads  of  National  Life,  Economic  Life,  and  three 
fundamental  qualities  of  a  healthy  national  life — Purity, 
Justice,  and  the  Treatment  of  the  Poor.  Every  phase  of 
the  laws  which  remain  for  discussion  can  easily  be  brought 
under  these  heads,  and  this  chapter  will  discuss  the  first 
of  them,  the  organisation  of  the  national  life. 

It  is  a  striking  instance  of  the  accuracy  of  the  national 
memory  that  there  is  a  clear  and  conscious  testimony  to 
the  fact  that  for  long  there  was  no  king  in  Israel.     Had 

295 


296  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  later  historians  been  at  the  mercy  of  a  tradition  so 
deeply  influenced  by  later  times  as  it  pleases  some  critics 
to  suppose,  it  would  seem  inexplicable  that  Moses  should 
not  have  been  represented  as  a  king,  and  especially  that 
the  conquest  should  not  have  been  represented  as  a  king's 
work.     Evidently    there   was   a   perfectly   clear    national 
consciousness  of  the  earlier  circumstances  of  the  nation, 
and  it  presents  us  with  an  outline  of  the  original  constitu- 
tion which  is  very  simple  and  credible.     According  to  this 
the  tribes  whom  Moses  led  were  ruled  in  the  main  by 
their  own  sheikhs    or   elders.     Under   these   again  were 
the  clans  or  fathers'  houses  similarly  governed ;  and  lastly, 
there  were  the  families  in  the  wider  sense,  made  up  of 
the  individual  households  and  governed    by  their  heads. 
So  far  as  can  be  gathered,  Moses  did  not  interfere  with 
this  fundamental  organisation  at  all.     He  added  to  it  only 
his  own  supremacy,  as  the  mediator  and  means  of  com- 
munication between  Yahweh  and  His  people.     As  such, 
his  decision  was  final  in  all  matters  too  difficult  for  the 
sheikhs   and  judges.     But   the  fundamental   point   never 
lost  sight  of  was  that  Yahweh  alone  was  their  ruler,  their 
legislator,   their  leader  in   war,   and   the    doer    of  justice 
among    His    people.      From    the    very    first    moment    of 
Israel's    national    existence    therefore,   from    the    moment 
that  it  passed  the  Red  Sea,  Yahweh  v/as  acknowledged 
as  King,  and  Moses  was  simply  His  representative.     That 
is  the  cardinal  fact  in  this  nation's  life,  and  amid  all  the 
difficulties  and  changes  of  its  later  history  that  was  always 
held   to.     Even  when    kings  were    appointed,   they  were 
regarded  only  as  the  viceroys  of  Yahweh.     In  this  way 
the  whole  of  the  national  affairs  received  a  religious  colour  ; 
and  those  who  look  at  them  from  a  religious  standpoint 
have  a  justification  which  would  have  been  less  manifest 
under  other  circumstances. 

It  is,  therefore,  no  delusion  of  later  times  which  finds 


xvii.  14-20]     SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— I.    THE  KING  297 

in  Israelite  institutions  a  deep  religious  meaning.  Nor  is 
the  persistence  with  which  the  Scriptural  historians  regard 
only  the  religious  aspects  of  national  life  to  be  laid  as  a 
fault  to  their  charge.  It  is  nothing  to  the  purpose  to  say 
that  the  bulk  of  the  people  had  no  thoughts  of  that  kind, 
that  the  whole  fabric  of  the  national  institutions  appeared 
to  them  in  a  different  light.  We  have  no  right  to  lower 
the  meaning  of  things  to  the  gross  materialism  of  the 
populace.  One  would  almost  think,  to  hear  some  Old 
Testament  critics  speak,  that  in  this  most  ideal  realm  of 
religion  we  can  be  safe  from  illusion  only  when  ideal 
points  of  view  are  abandoned,  that  only  in  the  commonest 
light  of  common  day  have  we  any  security  that  we  are 
not  deceiving  ourselves.  But  most  of  these  same  men 
would  resent  it  bitterly  if  that  standard  were  applied  to 
the  history  of  the  lands  they  themselves  love.  What 
Englishman  would  think  that  Great  Britain's  career  and 
destiny  were  rightly  estimated  if  imperial  sentiment  and 
humanitarian  aims  were  thrust  aside  in  favour  of  purely 
material  considerations  ?  Why  then  should  it  be  sup- 
posed that  the  views  and  opinions  of  the  multitude  are 
the  only  safe  criterion  to  be  applied  to  the  institutions 
of  God's  ancient  people  ? 

In  truth,  there  is  no  reason  why  we  should  think  so. 
The  Divine  kingship  made  it  impossible  that  the  higher 
minds  should  be  content  with  the  low  aims  of  the  oppor- 
tunists of  their  day,  whether  these  were  of  the  multitude 
or  not.  Even  the  entrance  into  Canaan,  which  to  the 
mass  of  the  people  was,  in  the  first  place,  a  mere 
acquisition  of  territory  and  wealth,  was  idealised  for  the 
leaders  of  the  people  by  the  thought  that  it  was  the  land 
promised  by  Yahweh  to  their  fathers,  the  land  in  which 
they  should  live  in  communion  with  Him.  Generally,  it  may 
be  said  that  the  desire  for  communion  with  God  was  the 
impelling  and  formative  povv^er  in  Israel.     The  thoughts 


298  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

of  even  the  dullest  and  most  earthly  were  touched  by  that 
ideal  at  times ;  and  no  leader,  whether  royal,  or  priestly, 
or  prophetic,  ever  really  succeeded  among  this  people 
who  did  not  keep  that  persistently  in  view  as  the  true 
goal  of  his  eftorts.  Moreover  this  gave  its  depth  of 
meaning  to  the  whole  movement  of  history  in  Israel. 
Every  triumph  and  defeat,  every  lapse  and  every  reform 
had,  owing  to  this  direction  of  the  people's  efforts,  a 
significance  far  beyond  itself  These  were  not  merely 
incidents  in  the  history  of  an  obscure  people ;  they  were 
the  pulsations  and  movements  of  the  world's  advance  to 
the  full  revelation  of  God.  All  that  would  have  been 
wholly  national  or  tribal  in  the  institutions  and  arrange- 
ments of  an  ordinary  people  was  in  Israel  lifted  up  into 
the  religious  sphere ;  and  the  orders  of  men  who  spoke 
for  the  invisible  King — the  earthly  king,  the  priest,  and 
the  prophet — became  naturally  the  organs  of  the  national 
life. 

The  king's  position  was  entirely  dependent  upon 
Yahweh.  He  was  to  be  chosen  by  Yahweh,  he  was  to 
act  for  Yahweh,  and  no  king  could  rightly  fill  his  place 
in  Israel  who  was.  not  loyal  to  that  conception.  It  is  in 
this  sense  that  David  was  the  man  after  God's  own  heart. 
He,  in  contrast  to  Saul  and  to  many  of  the  later  kings, 
accepted  with  entire  loyalty,  notwithstanding  his  great 
natural  powers,  the  position  of  viceroy  for  Yahweh.  It 
is,  therefore,  an  essential  truth  which  underlies  the 
Scriptural  judgment  that  the  kings  who  made  themselves, 
or  attempted  to  make  themselves,  independent  of  Yahweh, 
were  false  to  Israel  and  to  their  true  calling.  And  this 
is  why  Samuel,  when  the  people  demanded  a  king, 
regarded  the  movement  with  stern  disapproval,  and  why 
he  received  an  oracle  denouncing  the  movement  as  a 
falling  away  from  Yahweh.  For,  in  the  first  place,  the 
motive   for  the  people's  request,   their  desire   to   be  like 


xvii.  14-20.]     THE  SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— I.  THE  KING         299 


Other  nations,  was  in  itself  a  rejection  of  their  God.  It 
repudiated,  in  part  at  least,  the  position  of  Israel  as  His 
peculiar  people,  and  implied  that  an  earthly  king  would 
do  more  for  them  than  Yahweh  had  done  ;  whereas  if 
they  had  been  faithful  and  united  enough  in  spirit  they 
would  have  found  victory  easy.  In  the  second,  the 
request  in  itself  was  a  confession  of  unfitness  for  their 
high  national  calling ;  it  was  a  confession  of  failure  under 
the  conditions  which  had  been  Divinely  appointed  for 
them.  Not  only  in  the  eyes  of  the  Biblical  historian 
therefore,  but  as  a  plain  matter  of  fact,  the  demand  was  an 
expression  of  dissatisfaction  on  the  people's  part  with  their 
invisible  King.  They  needed  something  less  spiritual  than 
Yahweh's  invisible  presence  and  the  prophetic  word  to 
guide  them.  But  since  they  had  declared  themselves  thus 
unfaithful,  Yahweh  had  to  deal  with  them  at  that  level, 
and  granted  their  request  as  a  concession  to  their  unbelief 
and  hardness  of  heart. 

That  is  the  representation  of  the  Books  of  Samuel ;  and 
the  absence  of  any  similar  law  from  the  codes  before 
Deuteronomy  confirms  the  view  that  the  earthly  kingship 
was  not  an  essential  part  of  the  polity  of  Israel,  but  a 
mere  episode.  Nowhere  in  legislation  save  here  in 
Deuteronomy  is  the  king  ever  mentioned,  and  nowhere, 
not  even  here,  is  any  provision  made  for  his  maintenance. 
No  civil  taxes  are  appointed  by  any  law,  while  the  most 
ample  provision  is  made  for  the  presentation  direct  to 
Yahweh,  as  Lord  paramount,  of  tithes  and  firstfruits. 

The  history  and  the  law  alike  agree  therefore  in  regard- 
ing the  kingship  as  somewhat  of  an  excrescence  upon 
the  national  polity  ;  and  this  law,  where  alone  the  king's 
existence  is  recognised,  confines  itself  strictly  to  securing 
the  theocratic  character  of  the  constitution.  He  must  be 
chosen  by  Yahweh;  he  must  be  a  born  worshipper  of 
Yahweh,  not  a  foreigner ;  and  he  must  rule  in  accordance 


300  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


with  the  law  given  by  Yahweh.  Further,  the  ideal 
Israelite  king  must  be  on  his  guard  against  the  grossly 
voluptuous  luxury  which  Oriental  sovereigns  have  never 
been  able  to  resist,  either  in  ancient  or  modern  times  ;  and 
also  against  the  [lust  for  war  and  conquest  which  was  the 
ruling  passion  of  Assyrian  and  Egyptian  kings.  Evidently 
too  the  ideal  king  of  Israel  was,  like  Bedouin  sheikhs  now, 
expected  to  be  rich,  able  to  maintain  his  state  out  of  his 
own  revenues.  The  tribute  paid  by  subject  peoples, 
together  with  the  booty  taken  in  war  and  the  profits  of 
trade,  were  his  only  legitimate  sources  of  income  beyond 
his  own  wealth.  Every  other  exaction  was  more  or  less 
of  an  oppression.  He  had  no  right  to  make  any  claims 
upon  the  land,  for  that  was  held  direct  of  Yahweh.  Nor 
were  there  any  regular  taxes,  so  far  as  the  Old  Testament 
informs  us.  The  only  approach  to  that  would  appear  to 
be  that  the  presents  with  which  his  subjects  voluntarily 
approached  the  king  were  sometimes  and  by  some  rulers 
made  permanent  demands ;  at  least  that  would  seem  to  be 
the  meaning  of  the  somewhat  obscure  statement  in  i  Sam. 
xvii.  25  that  King  Saul  would  reward  the  slayer  of 
Goliath  by  making  ''  his  father's  house  free  in  Israel." 
Some  kind  of  regular  exaction  from  which  the  victorious 
champion's  family  should  be  free  must  here  be  referred 
to  ;  but  it  would  not  be  safe,  in  the  absence  of  all  other 
evidence,  to  suppose  that  regular  taxes  in  the  modern 
sense  are  referred  to.  More  probably  something  of  the 
nature  of  the  ''  benevolences  "  which  Edward  IV.  intro- 
duced into  England  as  a  source  of  revenue  is  meant.  If 
a  popular  and  powerful  king  of  Israel  was  in  want  of 
money,  he  could  always  secure  it  by  ordering  those  able 
to  afford  handsome  presents  to  appear  yearly  before  him 
with  such  gifts  as  a  loyal  subject  should  offer.  For  the 
convenience  of  all  parties  an  indication  of  how  much 
would  be  expected  might  be  made,  and  then  he  would 


xvii.  14-20.]     THE  SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.—I.  THE  KING         301 


have  what  to  all  intents  and  purposes  would  be  a  tax. 
Along  with  this  he  might  also  enforce  the  corvee ;  but 
such  things  were  always  regarded  as  excesses  of  despotic 
power.  That  Samuel  in  his  mishpat  hammelekh  (i  Sam. 
viii.  15)  warns  the  people  that  the  king  would  demand  of 
them  a  tithe  of  their  cereal  crops  and  of  the  fruit  of  their 
vineyards  and  of  their  sheep,  does  not  contradict  this 
reading  of  the  passage  in  i  Sam.  xvii.  For  though 
chapter  viii.  belongs  to  the  later  portion  of  I  Samuel  and 
may  therefore  represent  what  the  kings  had  actually 
claimed,  yet  it  in  no  way  endorses  such  demands.  On 
the  contrary,  it  indicates  that  such  exactions  would  bring 
the  people  into  slavery  to  the  king  by  the  phrase  ''  And 
ye  shall  be  to  him  for  slaves."  All  that  is  mentioned 
there,  consequently,  is  part  of  the  evil  the  kingship  would 
bring  with  it,  and  cannot  in  any  way  be  regarded  as  a 
legal  provision  for  the  maintenance  of  royalty. 

It  is  not  probable,  therefore,  that  in  these  prescriptions 
the  author  of  Deuteronomy  is  repeating  a  more  ancient 
law.  No  such  law  has  come  down  to  us.  Dillmann 
supposes  the  provision  that  the  king  should  always  be 
an  Israelite  to  be  ancient ;  and  indeed  at  first  sight  it 
is  difficult  to  see  why  such  a  provision  should  be  intro- 
duced for  the  first  time  in  the  last  days  of  the  Southern 
Kingdom,  where  the  kingship  had  so  long  been  confined, 
not  only  to  IsraeHtes,  but  to  the  Davidic  line.  But 
Jer.  xxxii.  21 — ''Their  potentate  shall  be  of  themselves, 
and  their  governor  shall  proceed  from  the  midst  of 
them" — shows  that,  whatever  the  cause  might  be,  there 
was  in  the  first  years  of  the  sixth  century  a  longing  for 
a  native  king  similar  to  that  here  expressed.  In  any  case, 
as  the  obvious  intention  here  is  to  make  entire  submis- 
sion to  Yahweh  the  condition  of  any  legitimate  kingship, 
it  was  only  consistent  to  require  expressly  that  the 
king  should   be  one  of  Yahweh's  people.      That  motive 


302  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

would  be  quite  sufficient  to  account  for  raising  what  had 
been  the  invariable  practice  into  a  formulated  law ;  and 
no  other  of  the  prescriptions  need  have  been  ancient. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  curious  phrase  "  Only  he  shall 
not  multiply  horses  to  himself,  nor  cause  the  people  to 
return  to  Egypt  to  the  end  that  he  should  multiply 
horses;  forasmuch  as  Yahweh  hath  said  unto  you,  Ye 
shall  henceforth  return  no  more  that  way,"  can  hardly 
belong  to  the  Mosaic  time.  There  was  no  doubt  then 
much  danger  that  the  people  should  wish  to  return  to 
Egypt ;  but  that  a  king  should  cause  them  to  return 
for  horses,  is  too  much  of  a  subordinate  detail  to  have 
been  portion  of  a  Mosaic  prophecy.  If,  as  is  most  pro- 
bable, the  phrase  condemns  the  sending  of  Israelites 
into  Egypt  to  buy  horses  and  chariots,  it  can  have  been 
written  only  after  Solomon's  days.  Before  that  time 
Israel,  as  an  almost  exclusively  mountain  people,  regarded 
horses  and  chariots  with  dislike,  and  usually  destroyed 
them  when  they  fell  into  their  hands.  With  the  exten- 
sion of  their  power  over  the  plains  and  the  growth  of  a 
lust  for  conquest,  they  sought  after  chariots  eagerly.  To 
procure  them  they  entered  into  alliances  with  Egypt  which 
the  prophets  denounced,  and  which  brought  to  the  nation 
nothing  but  evil.  It  was  natural,  therefore,  that  the 
Deuteronomist  should  specially  mention  this  detail,  and 
should  support  it  by  reference  to  a  Divine  promise,  which 
does  not  appear  in  our  Bible,  but  which  probably  was 
found  in  either  the  Yahwistic  or  the  Elohistic  narrative. 

But  whether  the  whole  is  Deuteronomic  or  not,  there 
can  be  no  question  that  the  command  that  the  king  shall 
have  '*  a  copy  of  this  law  "  prepared  for  him  and  shall 
read  constantly  therein  is  so ;  and  perhaps  of  all  the  pre- 
scriptions this  is  the  most  important.  In  purely  Eastern 
states  there  is  no  legislature  at  all,  and  the  greater 
part  of  the  criminal  jurisdiction  especially  is  carried  on 


xvii.  14-20.]     THE  SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.—L  THE  KING        303 

without  any  reference  to  fixed  law  save  in  cases  affecting 
religion.  This  was  the  case  in  the  Mahratta  states  in 
India  so  long  as  they  were  independent.  The  ruler  and 
the  officers  he  appointed  administered  justice,  solely 
according  to  custom  and  their  own  notions  of  rectitude, 
*'  without  advertence  to  any  law  except  the  popular  notions 
of  customary  law."  ^  Now  in  Israel  the  state  of  things  was 
entirely  similar,  save  in  so  far  as  the  fundamental  principles 
of  Yahwistic  religion  had  been  formulated.  In  all  other 
respects  customary  law  ruled  everything.  But  it  was  the 
religious  influence  that  gave  its  highest  and  best  develop- 
ments to  the  Hfe  of  Israel.  It  was  this,  too,  which  brought 
to  such  early  maturity  in  Israel  the  principles  of  justice, 
mercy,  and  freedom.  Elsewhere  these  were  of  exceed- 
ingly slow  growth.  In  Israel,  the  influence  of  the  lofty 
religious  ideas  implanted  in  the  nation  by  Moses  did  for 
them  what  the  influence  of  the  higher  political  and  social 
ideas  of  the  governing  Englishmen  are  said  to  do,  under 
favourable  circumstances,  for  the  Indian  peoples.  Without 
disturbing  the  general  harmony  which  must  subsist  be- 
tween all  parts  of  the  organism  of  the  State  if  the  nation's 
life  is  to  be  healthy,  and  without  putting  it  out  of  relation 
with  its  surroundings,  that  influence  has  been,  and  is 
still,  moving  the  more  backward  Indian  societies  along 
the  natural  paths  of  human  progress  at  a  greatly  accelerated 
speed.^  In  a  similar  way  the  Israehte  people  was  moved 
by  the  Mosaic  influence,  in  its  aspirations  at  least,  with  an 
elsewhere  unexampled  speed  and  certainty,  towards  an 
ideal  of  national  life  which  no  nation  since  has  even 
endeavoured  to  realise.  But  whenever  the  kings  threw 
off  the  yoke  of  Yahweh  and  plunged  into  idolatry,  then 
the  evils  of  despotic  Oriental  rule  made  their  appearance 
unchecked.     These   evils  have  been   enumerated  in   the 

*  Tupper,  Our  Indian  Protectorate,  pp.  248,  249.  '  Ibid.,  p.  32  li 


304  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

following  words  by  one  well  acquainted  with  Oriental 
states  :  *'  Cruelty,  superstition,  callous  indifference  to  the 
security  of  the  weaker  and  poorer  classes,  avarice,  corrup- 
tion, disorder  in  all  public  affairs,  and  open  brigandage." 
With  the  exception  perhaps  of  the  last,  these  are  precisely 
the  sins  which  the  prophets  are  continually  denouncing. 
Long  before  Hezekiah  they  were  rampant,  especially  in 
the  Northern  Kingdom,  and  in  the  evil  days  between 
Hezekiah  and  Josiah,  when  we  suppose  Deuteronomy  to 
have  been  written,  they  were  indulged  in  without  shame 
or  compunction. 

The  result  was  that  an  inarticulate  cry,  like  that  we 
hear  to-day  from  Persia  in  the  articulate  form  of  newspaper 
articles,  must  have  filled  the  hearts  of  all  righteous  men 
and  the  multitude  of  the  oppressed.  What  it  would  be 
we  may  learn  from  the  following  extract  from  a  letter 
written  from  Persia  to  the  Kamin^  i.e.  *'  Law,"  a  Persian 
newspaper  pubhshed  in  London,  and  translated  by 
Arminius  Vambery  in  the  Deutsche  Rundschau  for 
October  1893:  '*Oh,  brothers,  behold  how  deeply  we 
have  sunk  into  the  sea  of  ignominy  and  shame.  Tyranny, 
famine,  disease,  poverty,  calamity,  decay  of  character,  and 
all  the  misery  in  the  world  has  overflowed  our  country. 
The  cause  of  all  this  misfortune  lies  in  this,  that  Vv^e  have 
no  laws  ;  only  in  this,  that  our  conscienceless  and  foolish 
great  ones  have  wilfully  and  purposely  rejected,  trodden 
under  foot,  and  destroyed  the  laws  of  the  sacred  code, 
.  .  .  We  are  men,  and  would  have  laws  I  It  is  not 
new  laws  we  ask  for,  but  we  desire  that  our  secular  and 
spiritual  heads  should  assemble  and  press  for  the  enforce- 
ment of  the  holy  laws  of  the  sacred  code.  Therefore  we 
ask  of  you  this  one  thing,  that  you  should  proclaim  :  *  We 
are  men,  and  would  have  laws.'  "  The  East  is  so  perenni- 
ally the  same,  that  the  two  thousand  five  hundred  years 
which  separate  that  pathetic  cry  from  the  prayers  of  the 


xvii.  14-20.]     THE  SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— I.  THE  KING         305 


true  Israel  in  Manasseh's  and  Amon's  days  make  no 
radical  difference.  The  situation  was  the  same,  and  the 
need  was  the  same.  Hence  came  this  prophetic  and 
priestly  redaction  of  the  Law  of  the  Covenant.  "  They 
were  men,  and  would  have  laws."  They  sought  to  be 
freed  from  the  greed,  the  cruelty,  and  the  lawlessness 
of  their  rulers ;  and  having  produced  their  revised  code, 
they  wished  to  secure  that  it  should  not  disappear  from 
memory,  as  the  more  ancient  law  had  been  suffered  to  do. 
It  must  be  kept  continually  before  the  king's  mind.  '*  It 
shall  be  with  him,  and  he  shall  read  therein  all  the  days 
of  his  life ;  that  he  may  learn  to  fear  Yahweh  his  God, 
to  keep  all  the  words  of  this  law  and  these  statutes  to 
do  them."  In  this  way  it  was  thought  that  future  ''  great 
ones  "  would  be  prevented  from  ''rejecting,  treading  under 
foot,  and  destroying  the  laws  of  the  sacred  code." 

But  the  king  of  Israel  was  not  only  to  be  a  law-abiding 
and  a  law-enforcing  king.  He  was  to  learn  from  this  new 
law  even  a  deeper  lesson.  He  was  to  read  daily  in  the 
law,  "  that  his  heart  might  not  be  lifted  up  above  his 
brethren."  Oriental  despots  either  openly  claim  that  they 
are  of  higher  and  purer  blood  than  their  subjects,  or  they 
deal  with  these  latter  as  if  they  had  nothing  in  common 
with  them.  In  the  laws  of  Manu  it  is  said,  "  Even  an 
infant  king  must  not  be  despised,  (from  an  idea)  that  he  is 
a  (mere)  mortal ;  for  he  is  a  great  deity  in  human  form." 
It  was  not  to  be  so  in  Israel.  His  subjects  were  the 
Israelite  king's  "  brethren."  They  all  stood  in  the  same 
relation  to  their  God.  All  equally  had  shared  Yahweh's 
favour  in  being  delivered  from  the  bondage  of  Egypt. 
Each  had  the  same  rights,  the  same  privileges,  the  same 
claims  to  justice  and  consideration  as  the  king  himself  had. 
That,  this  law  was  to  teach  the  king ;  and  when  he  had 
learned  the  lesson,  it  is  taken  for  granted  that  the  root 
from  which  the  other  evils  spring  would  be  destroyed. 

20 


3o6  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Such,  then,  the  ruler  of  Israel  was  to  be.  He  was  to 
feel,  first  of  all  his  responsibility  to  God.  Then  he  was 
to  deny  himself  to  the  lust  of  conquest,  to  the  voluptuous 
pleasures  of  the  flesh,  to  the  most  devouring  lust  of  all, 
the  love  of  money.  Last  of  all,  and  above  all,  he  was  to 
acknowledge  his  equality  with  the  poorest  of  the  people 
in  the  sight  of  God.  Could  there  be  even  yet  a  nobler 
ideal  set  before  the  kings  of  the  world  than  this  ?  The 
reign  of  only  one  king  of  Israel,  Josiah,  promised  its 
realisation.  That  seemed,  indeed,  to  be  "  the  fair  begin- 
ning of  a  time."  But  it  was  not  so  ;  it  proved  to  be  only 
an  afterglow,  a  mere  prelude  to  the  night.  None  of  his 
successors  made  even  an  attempt  to  imitate  him,  and  the 
destruction  of  the  Jewish  State  put  an  end  to  all  hope  of 
the  appearance  of  the  Yahwistic  king  in  Israel.  Else- 
where, before  the  coming  of  Christ,  he  did  not  appear. 
Since  Christ's  coming,  here  and  there,  at  rare  intervals, 
such  rulers  have  been  found.  But  in  the  East  perhaps 
the  only  rulers  who  can  be  said  to  have  made  any 
attempt  in  this  direction  are  the  best  of  the  great 
uncrowned  kings  of  India,  the  British  viceroys. 

Such,  for  example,  was  Lord  Lawrence's  aim,  and  his 
reward.  From  the  beginning  to  the  end  of  his  Indian 
career  he  lived  a  pure  and  simple  life,  laboured  with 
untiring  energy  for  the  good  of  the  people,  and  kept  in 
his  mind,  as  his  aspirations  for  his  Punjaub  peasantry 
show,  the  Old  Testament  ideal  of  both  ruler  and  ruled. 
He  was,  too,  entirely  free  from  the  lust  of  conquest,  as 
some  Indian  viceroys  have  not  perhaps  been ;  and  he  did 
all  his  work  under  a  solemn  sense  of  responsibihty  to 
God.  To  a  large  extent,  the  Biblical  ideal  made  him  what 
he  was  as  a  ruler,  and  the  life  and  power  of  that  ideal 
now,  in  such  men,  sufficiently  show  the  truth  of  the 
prophetic  and  priestly  insight  which  is  embodied  here. 
Many  who  have  disregarded  these  rules  have  done  great 


xvii.  14-20.]     THE  SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— I.  THE  KING         307 

things  for  the  world  ;  but  we  are  only  the  more  sure,  after 
two  thousand  five  hundred  years,  that  on  these  lines  alone 
can  the  ruler  attain  his  highest  and  purest  eminence.  All 
the  aspirations  of  men  to-day  are  towards  a  state  of  things 
in  which  rulers,  whether  they  be  any  longer  kings  or  no, 
shall  stand  on  a  level  of  brotherhood  with  their  subjects, 
and  shall  set  the  good  of  the  ruled  before  them  as  their 
sole  aim.  All  men  are  dreaming  now  of  a  future  in 
which  personal  ambition  shall  have  little  scope,  in  which 
none  will  be  for  himself  or  for  a  party,  but  "all  will  be 
for  the  State."  If  ever  that  good  dream  be  realised, 
rulers  of  the  Deuteronomic  type  will  be  universal ;  and 
the  depth  of  wisdom  embodied  ir  the  laws  of  this 
small  and  obscure  Oriental  people,  so  many  ages  ago, 
will  be  manifested  in  a  general  political  and  social  happi- 
ness such  as  has  never  yet  been  seen,  on  any  large  scale 
at  least,  in  the  history  of  men. 


CHAPTER    XVIII 

SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— II.    THE  PRIEST 

Deut.  xviii.  1-8 

THE  priesthood  naturally  follows  the  kingship  in  the 
regulations  regarding  the  position  of  the  governing 
classes.  But  it  was  an  older  and  much  more  radical 
constituent  in  the  polity  of  Israel  than  we  have  seen  the 
kingship  to  be.  Originally,  the  priests  were  the  normal 
and  regular  exponents  of  Yahweh's  will.  They  received 
and  gave  forth  to  the  people  oracles  from  Him,  and  they 
were  the  fountain  of  moral  and  spiritual  guidance.  The 
Torah  of  the  priests,  which  on  the  older  view  was  the 
Pentateuch  as  we  have  it,  or  its  substance  at  least,  which 
Moses  had  put  into  their  hands,  is  much  more  probably 
now  regarded  as  the  guidance  given  by  means  of  the  sacred 
lot  and  the  Urim  and  Thummim.  Because  of  their  special 
nearness  to  and  intimacy  with  God,  the  priests  were  in 
contact  with  the  Divine  will  and  could  receive  special 
Divine  guidance ;  and  in  days  when  the  voice  of  prophecy 
was  dumb,  or  in  matters  which  it  left  untouched,  the 
priestly  Torah,  or  direction,  was  the  one  authorised  Divine 
voice.  But  this  was  not  the  only  function  of  the  priests. 
Sacrificial  worship  was  a  more  fundamental  function. 
Wellhausen  and  his  school  indeed  seem  inclined  to  deny 
that  as  priests  of  Yahweh  they  had  any  Divinely  ordered 
connection  with  sacrifice.  But  the  truer  view  is  that  their 
power  to  give  Torah  to  Israel  depended  entirely  upon 
their  being  the  custodians   of  the  places  where  Yahweh 

308 


xviii.  1-8.]        SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.-II.  THE  PRIEST  309 


had  caused  His  name  to  be  remembered.  The  theory 
was  that,  as  they  approached  Him  with  sacrifices  in 
His  sanctuaries,  they  consequently  could  speak  for  Him ; 
so  that  the  guarding  of  His  shrines,  and  the  offering  of 
the  people's  sacrifices  there  were  their  first  duties.  In 
fact  they  were  the  mediators  between  Yahweh  and  Israel. 
Yahweh  was  King,  but  He  was  invisible,  and  the  priests 
were  His  visible  earthly  representatives.  The  dues, 
which  in  a  merely  secular  state  would  have  gone  to  the 
king,  as  rent  for  the  lands  held  of  him,  were  employed  for 
their  appointed  uses  by  the  priests,  as  the  servants  and 
representatives  of  the  heavenly  King  who  had  bestowed 
the  land  upon  Israel  and  allotted  to  each  family  its  por- 
tion. Occupying  a  middle  position,  then,  between  the 
two  parties  to  the  Covenant  by  which  Israel  had  become 
Yahweh's  chosen  people,  they  spoke  for  the  people  when 
they  appeared  before  Yahweh,  and  for  Him  when  they 
came  forth  to  the  people.  They  were,  as  we  have  said, 
the  oldest  and  most  important  of  the  ruling  classes,  and 
must  have  been  from  early  times  a  special  order  set 
apart  for  the  service  of  Israel's  God. 

The  main  passages  in  Deuteronomy  which  bear  upon 
the  position  and  character  of  the  priesthood  and  of  the 
tribe  of  Levi  are  the  following.  In  chaps,  xviii.  1-8,  x. 
6-9,  and  xxvii.  9-14  the  strictly  priestly  functions  of  the 
tribe  of  Levi  are  dealt  with;  in  xvii.  98*.  xix.  17,  the 
judicial  functions  ;  in  xxi.  1-5  their  function  in  connection 
with  sanitary  matters  is  referred  to.  Besides  these  there 
are  the  various  injunctions  to  invite  the  Levites  to  the 
sacrificial  feasts,  because  they  have  no  inheritance,  and 
a  number  of  references  to  the  priesthood  as  a  well- 
known  body,  the  constitution  and  duties  of  which  did  not 
need  special  treatment.  These  last  are  of  themselves 
sufficient  to  prove  beyond  question  that  in  dealing  with 
the  priests  and   Levites   the    author  of  this  book  writes 


310  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

from  out  of  the  midst  of  a  long  established  system. 
He  does  not  legislate  for  the  introduction  of  priests, 
neither  does  he  refer  to  a  priestly  system  recently 
elaborated  by  himself,  and  only  now  coming  into  opera- 
tion. He  does  not  tell  us  how  priests  are  to  be  appointed, 
nor  from  whom,  nor  with  what  ceremonies  of  conse- 
cration they  are  to  be  inducted  into  their  office.  In  fact 
the  writer  speaks  of  what  concerns  the  priests  and 
Levites  in  a  manner  which  makes  it  certain  that  in  his 
day  there  were,  and  had  long  been,  Levites  who  were 
priests,  and  Levites  of  whom  it  may  at  least  be  said  that 
they  were  probably  nothing  more  than  subordinates  in 
regard  to  religious  duty.  In  a  word,  while  presupposing 
an  established  system  of  priestly  and  Levitical  service,  he 
nowhere  attempts  to  give  any  clear  or  complete  view  of 
that  system.  His  whole  mind  is  turned  towards  the  people. 
It  is  about  their  duties  and  their  rights  he  is  anxious, 
about  their  duties  perhaps  more  than  their  rights ;  and  he 
touches  upon  matters  connected  with  others  than  the 
people  only  in  a  cursory  way.  In  this  matter,  especially, 
he  clearly  needs  to  be  supplemented  by  information  drawn 
from  other  sources,  and  his  every  word  about  it  shows 
that  he  is  not  introducing  or  referring  to  anything  new. 
Any  modifications  he  makes  are  plainly  stated  and  are 
limited  to  a  few  special  points. 

The  chief  passage  for  our  purpose  is,  however,  xviii.  i-8, 
where  we  have  the  agents  of  the  cultus  defined,  and 
directions  for  the  dues  to  be  given  them.  In  ver.  I  these 
agents  are  clearly  said  to  be  the  whole  tribe  of  Levi ;  for 
the  phrase  '*  The  priests,  the  Levites,  the  whole  tribe 
of  Levi,"  cannot  mean  the  priests  and  the  Levites  who 
together  make  up  the  whole  tribe  of  Levi.  Notwithstand- 
ing the  arguments  of  Keil  and  Curtiss  and  other  ingenious 
scholars,  the  unprejudiced  mind  must,  I  think,  accept 
Dillmann's  rendering,  "  The  Levitical  priests,  the  whole 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— II.  THE  PRIEST  311 

tribe  of  Levi/'  the  latter  clause  standing  in  apposition  to 
the  former.  In  that  case  Deuteronomy  must  be  held  to 
regard  every  Levite  as  in  some  sense  priestly.  This  view 
is  confirmed  by  x.  2>^.^  where  distinctly  priestly  duties  are 
assigned  to  the  "  tribe  of  Levi."  Some  indeed  assert 
that  this  verse  was  written  by  a  later  editor,  but  valid 
reasons  for  the  assertion  are  somewhat  difficult  to  find.-^ 
Neither  Kuenen  nor  Oettli  nor  Dillmann  find  any.  We 
may,  then,  accept  it  as  Deuteronomic  since  critics  of  such 
various  leanings  do  so.  To  quote  Dillmann,  ^*  Beyond 
question,  therefore,  the  tribe  as  a  whole  appears  here  as 
called  to  sacred,  especially  priestly  service ;  only  it  does 
not  follow  from  that  that  every  individual  member  of  the 
tribe  could  exercise  these  functions  at  his  pleasure,  with- 
out there  being  any  organisation  and  gradation  among 
these  servants  of  God."  No,  that  does  not  follow ;  and 
this  very  passage  (Deut.  xviii.  1-8)  shows  that  it  does  not, 
for  it  makes  a  very  clear  distinction.  In  vv.  3  ff.  the  dues 
of  the  priest  are  dealt  with,  while  in  vv.  6  ff.  those  of  the 
Levite  in  one  special  case  are  provided  for.  As  if  to 
emphasise  the  distinction  between  them,  the  priest  in 
ver.  3  is  not  called  '*  Levitical,"  as  he  is  in  other  passages. 
Further,  the  verses  concerning  the  Levite  also  emphasise 
the  distinction ;  for  few  will  be  able  to  adopt  the  view  that 
here  in  vv.  6ff.  every  Levite  who  chooses  is  authorised 
to  become  a  priest,  by  the  mere  process  of  presenting 
himself  at  the  central  sanctuary.  The  author  of  Deuter- 
onomy must  have  known,  better  probably  than  any  one 
now  considering  this  matter,  that  the  priests  in  the  central 
sanctuary  would  never  consent  to  divide  their  privileges 
and  their  income  with  every  member  of  their  tribe  who 
might  choose  to  come  up  to  Jerusalem.  Indeed,  if  they 
had  received  each  and  every  one,  the  crowd  would  have 

'  Kuenen,  H.  K.  O.,  Eerste  Deel,  p.  113. 


312  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

been  an  embarrassment  instead  of  a  help.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  when  the  Deuteronomic  reform  came  to  be  put  in 
practice,  this  free  admission  of  every  Levite  to  the  service 
of  the  Jerusalem  Temple  was  not  adopted,  and  it  is  prima 
facie  improbable  that  the  author  of  it  can  have  meant  his 
provision  in  that  sense.  The  meaning  seems  to  be  that, 
as  only  those  Levites  who  were  employed  in  the  central 
sanctuary  could  be  de  facto  priests,  those  living  in  the 
country  were  not  priests  in  the  same  sense ;  and  the 
regulation  made  is  that  if  any  Levite  came  up  to  Jerusalem 
and  was  received  into  the  ranks  of  the  Temple  Levites,  i.e. 
the  sacrificial  priests,  he  should  receive  the  same  dues  as 
the  others  performing  the  same  work  did.  But  though 
no  conditions  of  admission  to  the  Temple  service  are 
mentioned,  obviously  there  must  have  been  some  conditions, 
some  division  of  labour,  some  organisation  involving 
gradations  in  rank,  and  perhaps  also  some  limitation  as 
to  time  in  the  case  of  such  voluntary  service  as  is  here 
dealt  with.  For,  as  Dillmann  points  out,  it  is  not  said 
that  the  service  of  every  Temple  Levite  is  the  same ; 
numbers  of  them  may  have  had  no  higher  work  than  the 
Levites  under  the  laws  of  the  Priest  Codex. 

Moreover  the  other  functions  assigned  to  the  priests 
confirm  the  argument,  and  prove  that  in  the  time  of 
Deuteronomy  distinctions  of  rank  among  the  Levites  must 
have  been  firmly  established.  They  had  a  place  in  the 
public  justiciary,  even  in  the  supreme  court,  "in  the 
place  which  Yahweh  their  God  "  had  chosen  (Deut.  xvii.  9, 
xix.  17).  Not  only  so,  the  law  concerning  a  man  found 
slain  in  chap,  xxi.,  vv.  1-5,  implies  that  there  were  in 
the  cities  throughout  the  land  priests,  the  sons  of  Levi, 
whom  "  Yahweh  thy  God  hath  chosen  to  minister  unto 
Him  and  to  bless  in  the  name  of  Yahweh,  and  according 
to  their  word  shall  every  controversy  and  every  stroke 
be."     Now  it  cannot  possibly  have  been  the  intention  of 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— II.  THE  PRIEST  313 

the  author  of  Deuteronomy  that  every  member  of  the  tribe 
of  Levi  should  have  equal  povi^er  to  decide  such  matters. 
If  in  his  view  every  Levite  was  a  priest,  then  we  should 
have  this  impossible  state  of  affairs,  that  the  highest  courts 
for  judicial  process  should  be  in  the  hands  of  a  class  which 
was  more  largely  indebted  to  the  generosity  of  the  rich 
for  its  maintenance  than  any  other  in  the  country.  It 
seems  plain  therefore  that  every  Levite  could  not  exercise 
full  priestly  functions  because  of  his  birth.  Clearly,  if 
any  Levite  might  become  a  priest  it  was  only  in  the  same 
sense  in  which  every  Napoleonic  soldier  was  said  to  carry 
a  marshal's  baton  in  his  knapsack.^ 

Finally,  in  this  passage  (ver.  5),  by  the  words  "him  and 
his  sons  for  ever,"  which  refer  back  to  ''the  priest,"  a 
hereditary  character  of  the  priesthood  is  asserted.  This 
phrase  is  remarkably  parallel  to  that  so  frequently  used 
by  P,  "Aaron  and  his  sons  "  ;  and  though  we  are  not  told 
in  what  family  or  families  the  priesthood  was  hereditary, 
it  must  have  been  so  in  some.  But  in  x.  6,  7,  the  family 
of  Aaron  is  mentioned  by  the  Deuteronomist  as  having 
hereditary  right  to  the  priesthood  at  the  central  shrine. 
There  can  therefore  be  no  doubt  that  in  the  time  of  the 
author  of  Deuteronomy  priesthood  was  hereditary,  perhaps 
in  several  families,  but  certainly  in  the  family  of  Aaron. 

The  remaining  point  in  these  verses  of  chap,  xviii.  is 
the  dues.     As  the  whole  tribe  had  no  land,  so  the  whole 

'  The  same  conclusion  must  be  come  to  in  connection  with  the  sanitary 
duties  of  the  priesthood  as  laid  down,  or  rather  as  alluded  to,  in 
Deut.  xxiv.  8,  9.  This  implies  that  the  Levitical  priests  had  special 
duties  in  connection  with  such  matters,  duties  which,  if  not  precisely  the 
same  as  those  laid  down  in  the  Law  of  Leprosy  (Lev.  xiii.,  xiv.),  must  have 
nearly  resembled  them.  Semi-medical  skill  must  have  been  necessary 
for  the  satisfactory  discharge  of  these  duties,  and  we  must  suppose  that 
the  priests  who  discharged  them  were  selected  from  the  tribe  of  Levi 
on  some  principle  either  of  special  proved  knowledge  and  fitness,  or 
on  the  ground  of  hereditary  devotion  to  such  work.  ^ 


314  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

tribe  had  a  share  in  the  dues  paid  by  the  people  to  their 
Divine  King.  In  vv.  3  ff.  we  have  a  statement  of  what 
these  were.  The  whole  tribe  of  Levi  are  to  eat  **  the 
offerings  of  Yahweh  made  by  fire,  and  His  inheritance. 
And  they  shall  have  no  inheritance  among  their  brethren  : 
Yahweh  is  their  inheritance,  as  He  hath  spoken  unto 
them."  The  only  place  in  Scripture  in  which  such  a 
promise  is  given  is  Numb,  xviii.  20,  24,  so  that  these 
passages,  if  not  referred  to  by  the  author  of  Deuteronomy, 
must  be  founded  upon  a  tradition  already  old  in  his  time. 
As  the  servants  of  Yahweh,  the  Levites  were  to  be 
wholly  Yahweh's  care ;  as  His  representatives,  they  were 
to  use  for  the  supply  of  their  needs  all  such  portions  of 
the  offerings  made  to  Him  by  fire  as  were  not  to  be 
consumed  on  the  altar.  Their  remaining  provision  was 
to  be  '^  His,"  i.e.  Yahweh's,  "  inheritance,"  or  rather 
^'  portion,"  or  that  which  belongs  to  Him.  Now  Yahweh's 
*'  portion  "  consisted  of  all  the  other  sacred  dues  (besides 
the  sacrifices)  which  should  be  paid  to  Yahweh,  such  as 
the  tithes,  the  firstlings,  and  the  firstfruits.  On  these  the 
whole  tribe  of  Levi  was  to  live,  and  so  be  free  to  give 
their  time  to  the  special  business  of  the  sanctuary,  and 
to  related  duties,  in  so  far  as  they  were  called  upon. 

But  there  were  to  be  distinctions.  In  vv.  3-5  we 
have  a  special  statement  of  what  was  to  be  paid  by  the 
people  to  the  priests,  i.e.  the  sacrificing  priests.  Of  every 
animal  offered  in  sacrifice,  except  those  offered  as  whole 
burnt-offerings,  they  were  to  receive  "the  shoulder,  the 
two  cheeks,  and  the  maw,"  all  choice  pieces.  Further, 
they  were  to  receive  the  "  firstfruits  of  corn,  wine,  oil, 
and  the  first  of  the  fleece  of  the  sheep."  For  the  priests 
of  one  sanctuary  these  would  be  quite  provision  enough, 
though  the  word  translated  ''firstfruits,"  reshith,  is  very 
indefinite,  and  probably  meant  much  or  little,  according 
ag   the   donor  was   liberal    or   churlish.     But   how  does 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— 11.  THE  PRIEST  315 

this  agree  with  that  which  is  bestowed  upon  the  priests 
according  to  the  Priest  Codex  ?  In  the  passage 
corresponding  to  this  (Lev.  vii.  31-34)  the  wave  breast 
and  the  heave  thigh  are  the  portions  which  are  to  be 
bestowed  upon  "  Aaron  the  priest  and  his  sons,  as  a  due 
for  ever  from  the  children  of  Israel  "  ;  and  where  the  first- 
fruits  are  dealt  with  (Numb,  xviii.  I2ff.)  "the  first  of  the 
fleece  of  the  sheep"  is  not  mentioned.  That  is  an  addition 
made  by  the  author  of  Deuteronomy ;  but  what  of  *'  the 
shoulder,  the  two  cheeks,  and  the  maw"?  Are  they  a 
substitute  for  the  "  wave  breast  and  the  heave  thigh,"  or 
are  they  an  addition  ?  If  we  hold  that  the  laws  in  the 
Pentateuch  were  all  given  by  Moses  in  the  wilderness, 
and  in  the  order  in  which  they  stand,  it  will  be  most 
natural  to  think  that  what  we  have  here  is  meant  to 
be  an  addition  to  what  Numbers  prescribes.  But  if  it 
is  established  that  Deuteronomy  is  a  distinct  work, 
written  at  a  different  period  from  the  other  books  of  the 
Pentateuch,  then,  though  there  is  not  sufficient  evidence 
to  justify  a  dogmatic  decision  on  either  side,  the  v/eight  of 
probability  is  in  favour  of  the  supposition  that  the  Deute- 
ronomic  provision  is  a  substitute,  or  at  least  an  alternative, 
for  what  we  have  in  Numbers.  The  fact  that  the  prescrip- 
tion in  Numbers  is  not  repeated  makes  for  that  view,  as 
well  as  the  fact  that  Deuteronomy  does  not  as  a  rule  tend 
to  increase  the  burdens  on  the  people.  Keil's  view,  that 
Deuteronomy  and  Numbers  are  dealing  with  quite  different 
sacrifices,  will  hardly  stand  examination.  He  thinks  that 
the  feasts  at  which  the  firstlings,  turned  into  money,  and 
the  third-year  tithes  were  eaten,  are  referred  to  here, 
while  in  Numbers  it  is  the  ordinary  peace-offerings  which 
are  dealt  with.  But  the  postponed  firstlings  were  eaten 
at  the  sanctuary,  and  would  consequently  come  under 
the  head  of  ordinary  sacrifices ;  and  the  third-year  tithes 
were   eaten   in    the  local    centres,    so   that  the   bringing 


3i6  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

of  the  priestly  portions  would  be  as  difficult  in  this 
case  as  in  the  case  of  the  slaughterings  for  ordinary 
meals,  which  Keil,  partly  for  that  reason,  thinks  cannot 
be  referred  to  here.  On  the  whole,  the  best  opinion 
seems  to  be  that  Deuteronomy  has  here  different  pre- 
scriptions from  those  in  Numbers,  and  that  probably 
there  is  a  considerable  interval  of  time  between  the  two. 

In  vv.  6-8  the  Levite  as  distinguished  from  the  priest 
is  dealt  with,  though  by  no  means  fully.  Only  in  one 
respect  are  special  regulations  given.  When  such  an 
one  came  to  do  duty  at  the  central  sanctuary,  he  was  to 
receive  his  share  of  the  sacrifices  with  the  rest. 

In  Chapter  I.  the  main  outlines  of  the  Deuteronomic 
system  of  priestly  arrangements  have  been  placed  along- 
side those  of  the  Book  of  the  Covenant  and  JE,  and  those 
of  P,  with  a  view  to  decide  whether  they  could  all  have 
been  the  work  of  one  lav/giver's  life.  Here  they  must  be 
compared  in  order  that  we  may  ascertain  whether  a  view 
of  the  development  of  the  priestly  tribe  which  will  do 
justice  to  these  various  documents  and  their  provisions 
can  be  suggested. 

Some  schools  of  critics  offer  the  hypothesis  that  there 
was  no  special  priesthood  till  late  in  the  time  of  the  kings. 
From  the  beginning,  they  say,  the  head  of  each  household 
was  the  family  priest,  and  secular  men,  such  as  the  kings, 
and  men  of  other  tribes  than  the  Levites,  could  be  and 
were  priests,  and  offered  sacrifice  even  at  Jerusalem. 
With  Deuteronomy  the  tribe  of  Levi  was  established  as 
the  priestly  tribe,  and  only  after  the  Exile  was  priesthood 
restricted  to  the  sons  of  Aaron.  But  this  scheme  does 
justice  to  one  set  of  passages  only  at  the  expense  of  an- 
other. It  accounts  for  all  that  is  anomalous  in  the  history, 
and  pushes  aside  the  main  and  consistent  affirmation  of 
all  our  authorities,  that  from  the  earliest  days  the  tribe 
of  Levi  had  a  special  connection  with  sacred  things  and 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— 11.  THE  PRIEST  317 

a  special  position  in  Israel.  To  what  straits  its  advocates 
are  reduced  may  be  seen  in  the  fact  that  Wellhausen  has 
to  declare  that  there  were  two  tribes  of  Levi,  one  purely 
secular  that  was  all  but  destroyed  in  an  attack  upon 
Shechem,  and  which  afterwards  disappeared,  and  a  later 
ecclesiastical  and  somewhat  factitious  tribe,  or  caste,  which 
"  towards  the  end  of  the  monarchy  arose  out  of  the 
separate  priestly  families  of  Judah."^  A  more  improbable 
suggestion  than  that  can  hardly  be  conceived. 

But  historical  analogy,  the  favourite  weapon  of  these 
very  critics,  also  condemns  it.  Let  us  look  at  the  growth 
of  the  priesthood  in  other  ancient  nations.  In  small  and 
isolated  communities  the  head  of  the  household  was 
generally  the  family  priest,  and  in  all  probability  this 
was  the  case  in  the  various  separate  tribes  of  which 
Israel  was  composed ;  at  least  it  was  so  in  the  house- 
holds of  the  patriarchs.  But,  in  communities  formed  by 
amalgamation  of  different  tribes — and  according  to  modern 
ideas  Israel  v/as  so  formed — there  was  almost  always 
superinduced  upon  that  more  primitive  state  of  things 
another  and  different  arrangement.  In  antiquity  no  bond 
could  hold  together  tribes  or  families  conscious  of  different 
descent,  save  the  bond  of  religion.  Consequently,  when- 
ever such  an  amalgamation  took  place,  the  very  first  thing 
which  had  to  be  done  was  to  establish  religious  rites 
common  to  the  whole  new  community,  which  of  course 
were  not  the  care  of  the  heads  of  households  as  such. 
Each  separate  section  of  the  composite  body  kept  up,  no 
doubt,  the  family  rites ;  but  there  had  to  be  a  common 
worship,  and  of  course  a  special  priesthood,  for  the  new 
community.  This  is  sufficiently  attested  for  the  Greeks 
and  Romans  by  De  Coulanges,  who  in  his  La  Cite 
Antique  gathers  together  such  a  mass  of  authorities  in 


'  History  of  Israel,  p.  145. 


3£S  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

regard  to  this  matter  that  few  will  be  inclined  to  dis- 
pute his  conclusion.  On  page  146  he  says :  '^  Several 
tribes  might  unite,  on  condition  that  the  worship  of  each 
was  respected.  When  such  an  alliance  was  entered  into, 
the  city  or  state  came  into  existence.  It  is  of  little  import- 
ance to  inquire  into  the  causes  which  induced  several 
tribes  to  unite ;  what  is  certain  is  that  the  bond  of  the 
new  association  was  again  a  religion.  The  tribes  which 
grouped  themselves  to  form  a  state  never  failed  to  light  a 
sacred  fire,  and  to  set  up  a  common  religion."  But  the 
family  and  tribal  rites  continued  to  exist  as  sacra  privata^ 
just  as  the  central  government  dominated  but  did  not 
destroy  the  family  and  tribal  governments.^ 

It  may  be  objected  that  these  customs  are  proved  only 
for  the  Aryan  races,  and  that,  though  proved  for  them, 
they  form  no  valid  analogy  for  Semitic  peoples.  But 
besides  the  fact  that  part  of  the  statements  we  have 
quoted  are  obviously  true  of  Israel,  we  have  a  guarantee 
that  the  principle  enunciated  is  also  valid  for  it.  The 
whole  process  traced  in  the  religious  progress  of  the 
Aryan  nations  is  based  upon  the  worship  of  ancestors. 
Now  one  of  the  critical  discoveries  is  that  ancestor- 
worship  was  'a  part  of  the  religion  of  the  tribes  which 
afterwards  united  to  form  the  Israelite  nation.  Some,  like 
Stade,  tell  us  that  that  was  the  early  religion  of  Israel 
itself  In  that  form  the  theory  is,  I  think,  to  be  rejected ; 
but  there  would  seem  to  be  little  doubt  that,  before  the 
birth  of  the  nation,  ancestor-worship  was  much  practised 
by  the  Hebrew  tribes.  If  so,  we  may  quite  safely  take 
over  the  analogy  we  have  established,  and  believe  that 
when  Moses  united  the  tribes  into  a  nation,  the  religion 
of  Yahweh  was  the  absolutely  necessary  connecting  link 
which  bound  them  together.     For  though  the  tribes  were 

'  Cf.   also  Muirhead,  article  "  Roman  Law,"  in  Ency.  Brit.,  vol.    xx, 
p.  669,  2nd  col,,  and  Ramsay,  Church  inRommt  Empire,  p.  190. 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.~II.  THE  PRIEST  319 


related,  and  are  represented  as  the  descendants  of  Abraham, 
they  must  have  varied  considerably  from  each  other  in 
religious  beHefs  and  usages.  By  Moses  these  variations 
were  extinguished,  as  far  as  that  was  possible,  by  the 
establishment  of  an  exclusive  Yahweh-worship  as  the 
national  cult;  and  to  carry  on  this,  not  the  heads  of 
households,  but  a  priesthood  that  represented  the  nation, 
must  have  been  selected.  But  if  so,  who  would  most 
naturally  be  selected  for  this  duty  ?  A  sentence  from  De 
Coulanges  will  show  that  in  this  case  the  tribe  of  Levi 
would  almost  necessarily  be  chosen.  Speaking  of  cases 
in  which  a  composite  state  relieved  itself  of  the  trouble 
of  inventing  a  new  worship  by  adopting  the  special  god 
of  one  of  the  component  tribes,  he  says  :  "  But  when 
a  family  consented  to  share  its  god  in  this  fashion  it 
reserved  for  itself  at  least  the  priesthood."  Now  if  that 
was  the  case  in  Israel,  the  priesthood  of  the  tribe  of  Levi 
would  at  once  become  a  necessity.  Whether  Yahweh 
had  been  ever  known  to  the  other  tribes  or  not,  there  can 
be  little  doubt  that  the  knowledge  of  Him  which  made 
them  a  nation  and  started  them  on  their  unique  career  of 
spiritual  discovery  came  from  the  Mosaic  tribe,  and  family. 

The  God  whom  the  family  worshipped  became  the  God  of 
the  confederacy,  and  they  would  be  the  natural  guardians 
of  His  sanctuary.  This  would  not  in  the  least  involve 
special  sanctity  and  meekness  on  the  part  of  the  tribe,  as 
some  insist.  They  would  remain  a  tribe,  like  the  others ; 
but  their  leading  men  would  discharge  the  functions 
of  priests  for  the  confederated  nation.  It  is  difficult, 
indeed,  to  see  why  any  one  else  should  have  been 
thought  of:  most  Hkely  the  arrangement  was  made  as  a 
thing  of  course. 

But  if  there  was  such  a  common  worship,  there  must 
have  been  a  sanctuary  for  it,  and  at  it  the  Levitic  priests 
must  have  discharged  their  functions*     Now  though  the 


320  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Tabernacle,  as  P  knows  it,  is  not  spoken  of  either  in  J  E  or 
in  Deuteronomy,  a  ''tent  of  meeting"  at  which  Jehovah 
revealed  Himself  to  Moses  and  to  which  the  people  went 
to  seek  Yahweh  (Exod.  xxxiii.  7  ff.)  is  known  to  all  our 
authorities.  Further,  Wellhausen  himself  says,  ''If  Moses 
did  anything  at  all  he  certainly  founded  the  sanctuary  at 
Qadesh  and  the  Torah  there,  which  the  priests  of  the  ark 
carried  on  after  him,"  so  that  even  he  recognises  the 
necessity  we  have  pointed  out.  From  the  days  of  Moses 
onwards,  therefore,  there  must  have  been  special  priests 
of  Yahweh,  a  special  Yahwistic  sanctuary,  ritual  with  a 
special  sacrifice  presented  to  Yahweh,  and  lastly  a  central 
oracle,  which  is  precisely  what  the  passages  explained 
away  by  Wellhausen  assert.  But  of  course  at  that  early 
time,  even  if  the  ultimate  purpose  was  to  have  an  exclu- 
sively Levitical  priesthood,  concessions  to  the  old  state  of 
things  would  have  to  be  made.  The  Passover  was  left 
in  the  hands  of  the  household  priest,  and  in  other  ways 
probably  he  would  be  considered.  The  old  order  would 
insist  on  surviving,  and  the  rigour  of  the  later  arrange- 
ments cannot  then  have  been  attained.  In  other  respects 
we  know  that  it  was  so ;  and  we  may  well  believe  that 
the  priesthood  of  the  individual  householder  and  of  the 
rulers  was  tolerated,  and  as  far  as  possible  regulated,  so 
as  to  offer  no  public  scandal  to  the  religion  of  Yahweh. 
So,  among  the  Homeric  Greeks  special  hereditary  priest- 
hoods coexisted  with  a  political  priesthood  of  the  head  of 
the  State,  and  with  the  household  priesthood.^ 

The  laxity  on  these  points  ascribed  to  Moses  is,  how- 
ever, less  than  has  been  supposed.  At  Mount  Sinai 
he  certainly  did  appoint  the  "young  men  of  the  children 
of  Israel "  ^  to  slaughter  the  beasts  for  sacrifice ;  but 
he  reserved  for  himself,   a  Levite,  the   sprinkling  of  the 

'  Ragelsbach,  Homerische  Tlieologie,  p.  198. 
^  Exod.  xxiv.  5. 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— II.  THE  PRIEST  321 

blood  on  the  altar.^  He  also  made  Joshua  his  servant, 
an  Ephraimite,  the  keeper  of  the  sanctuary;  but  even 
under  the  Levitical  law,  a  priest's  slave  was  reckoned  to 
be  of  his  household  and  could  eat  of  the  holy  things. 
These  were  not  very  great  laxities,  and  there  is  nothing 
in  them  to  make  us  suppose  that  a  regular  priesthood  did 
not  exist  from  Sinai.  Moreover,  that  a  special  place  should 
be  assigned  to  Aaron  and  his  sons  was  natural.  He  was 
the  brother  of  Moses,  and  would  be  the  natural  represen- 
tative of  the  tribe,  since  Moses  was  removed  from  it  as 
being  leader  of  all.  Everything  therefore  concurs  to 
confirm  the  Biblical  view  that  the  Levitic  priesthood  had 
its  origin  at  Sinai,  and  that  at  the  chief  sanctuary  and 
oracle  the  chief  place  in  the  priesthood  fell  to  Aaron  and 
his  sons.  Worship  at  other  sanctuaries  was  permitted, 
and  there  the  heads  of  households  may  have  performed 
priestly  functions,  or  in  later  times  in  Canaan  some  other 
Levitic  families ;  but  that  there  was  a  central  sanctuary  in 
the  hands  of  Levitic  priests,  among  whom  the  family  of 
Aaron  had  a  chief  place,  is  what  the  circumstances,  the  his- 
torical data  we  have,  and  all  historical  analogy  alike  demand. 

For  the  discharge  of  their  sacred  functions  certain  dues 
were  doubtless  assigned  to  the  priests,  and  the  Levites 
sharing  in  the  subordinate  duties  of  the  sanctuary  would 
share  also  in  the  emoluments.  In  other  respects  Levi  in 
the  wilderness  would  differ  in  nothing  from  other  tribes. 
But  in  preparation  for  the  arrival  in  Canaan,  it  was  decreed 
that  Levi  should  ''  have  no  part  or  inheritance  in  Israel." 
Yahweh  was  to  be  their  inheritance. 

The  point  to  notice  here  is  that  this  tribe  was  to  retain 
the  nomadic  life  when  the  other  tribes  became  agricul- 
tural. The  reason  for  it  is  plain.  That  ancient  manner 
of  life  was  looked  upon  as  superior  in  a  religious  aspect 
to  the  agricultural  life.     In  the  first  place,  the  ancestral 

'  Exod.  xxxiii.  ii. 

21 


322  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

life  of  Israel  had  been  of  that  kind.  Abraham,  Isaac, 
and  Jacob  had  been  heads  of  nomadic  families  or  tribes ; 
and  the  pure  and  peaceful  religious  life,  the  intimate 
communion  with  God  which  they  enjoyed,  always  domin- 
ated the  imagination  of  the  pious  Israelite.  Moreover 
the  fundamental  revelation  had  come  to  Moses  when 
he  was  a  shepherd  in  the  waste.  Further,  the  life  or 
the  shepherd  is  necessarily  less  continuously  busy  than 
that  of  the  agriculturist ;  it  has,  therefore,  more  scope  in 
it  for  contemplation ;  and  in  many  countries  and  at  various 
times  shepherds  have  been  a  specially  thoughtful,  as 
well  as  a  specially  pious  class.  But,  perhaps  the  chief 
reason  was  that  the  shepherd  life  was  not  only  simple 
and  frugal  in  itself,  but  it  was  also  by  its  very  conditions 
free  from  some  of  the  greatest  dangers  to  which  the 
religious  life  of  the  Israelite  in  Canaan  was  exposed. 
When  the  bulk  of  the  people  adopted  the  settled  life,  they 
were  not  only  thrown  among  the  Canaanites,  but  they 
went  to  school  to  them  in  all  that  concerned  elaborate 
agriculture.  This  necessarily  made  the  intercourse  and 
connection  between  the  two  peoples  extremely  intimate, 
and  was  fruitful  in  evil  results.  From  this  the  semi- 
nomadic  portions  of  the  people  were  to  a  great  extent  free, 
and  they  would  seem  to  have  been  regarded  as  the  guardians 
of  a  higher  life  and  a  purer  tradition  than  others.  They 
represented  to  the  popular  mind  the  Israel  of  ancient  days, 
which  had  known  nothing  of  the  vices  of  cities,  and  in 
which  the  pure  uncorrupted  religion  of  Yahweh  had  held 
exclusive  sway. 

A  remarkable  narrative  of  the  Old  Testament  establishes 
this.  When  Jehu  was  engaged  in  his  sanguinary  suppres- 
sion of  the  house  of  Ahab,  and  the  Baal-worship  which 
they  had  introduced,  we  read  in  2  Kings  x.  1 5  ff.  that 
he  lighted  on  Jonadab  the  son  of  Rechab  coming  to  meet 
him.     This  Jonadab  was  the  chief  of  the  Rechabites,  a 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— 11.  THE  PRIEST  323 

nomadic  clan,  who  were  bound  by  oath  to  drink  no 
wine,  nor  to  build  houses,  nor  sow  seed,  nor  plant 
vineyards,  and  to  dwell  in  tents  all  their  days  (Jer. 
XXXV,  6,  7).  This  was  clearly  intended  as  a  protest  against 
the  prevailing  corruption  of  manners,  and  was  founded  on 
a  special  zeal  for  the  uncorrupted  religion  of  Yahweh. 
Recognising  Jonadab's  position  as  a  champion  of  true 
religion,  Jehu  anxiously  seeks  his  approval  and  co- 
operation. He  says,  "  Is  thine  heart  right,  as  my  heart 
is  with  thy  heart  ?  "  And  Jonadab  answered,  "  It  is." 
"  If  it  be,"  said  Jehu,  ''give  me  thine  hand."  And  he 
gave  him  his  hand,  and  he  took  him  up  to  him  into  the 
chariot.  And  he  said,  "  Come  with  me,  and  see  my  zeal 
for  Yahweh."  At  a  much  later  time,  Jeremiah,  at  the 
Divine  command,  used  the  faithfulness  of  these  nomads 
to  the  ordinances  of  their  chiefs  to  put  to  shame  the 
unfaithfulness  of  Israel  to  Yahweh's  ordinances ;  and 
promises  (Jer.  xxxv.  19)  that  because  of  it  "Jonadab 
the  son  of  Rechab  shall  never  want  a  man  to  stand  before 
Yahweh,"  i.e.  as  His  servant.  The  Nazarites,  again,  were 
in  some  measure  an  indication  of  the  same  thing.  Their 
rigorous  abstinence  from  the  fruit  of  the  vine  (the  special 
sign  and  gift  of  a  settled  life  in  a  country  like  Palestine) 
was  their  great  distinguishing  mark,  as  persons  peculiarly 
set  apart  to  the  service  of  God.  Something  analogous 
is  seen  in  that  other  desert  faith,  Mohammedanism.  When 
the  great  reformer,  Abd-el-Wahab,  attempted  to  bring  back 
Islam  to  its  primitive  power,  he  fell  back  largely  upon  the 
simplicity  of  the  desert  life,  though  he  did  not  insist  upon 
the  abandonment  of  agriculture  and  fixed  habitations. 

It  is,  therefore,  not  surprising  that  the  priestly  tribe 
was  kept  to  the  nomadic  life  by  the  ordinance  that  they 
should  not  have  a  portion  in  the  distribution  of  the 
Canaanite  territory.  But  according  to  the  narrative  of 
the  attack  upon  Shechem  by  Levi  and  Simeon,  and  the 


324  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

verses  in  the  blessing  of  Jacob  (Gen.  xlix.)  dealing  with 
these  tribes,  the  course  of  history  reinforced  this  com- 
mand. Whether  the  treachery  at  Shechem  occurred, 
as  the  Genesis  narrative  places  it,  before  the  Exodus, 
when  Israel  was  only  a  family,  or  was  an  incident  in  the 
history  of  the  two  tribes  after  Canaan  had  been  invaded, 
as  many  critics  think,^  the  significance  of  it  is  that  because 
of  an  historical  exhibition  of  fierce  and  intolerant  zeal  on 
the  part  of  Levi  and  Simeon,  which  the  other  tribes  would 
not  defend,  their  settlement  in  that  part  of  the  land  was 
rendered  difficult,  if  not  impossible.  Hence  Simeon  had 
to  seek  other  settlements,  while  Levi  fell  back  to  the 
position  assigned  to  it  by  its  priestly  character.  It  is  not 
a  valid  exception  to  this  view — which  reconciles  the  two 
statements  that  Levi  had  no  inheritance  with  the  other 
tribes  because  of  its  specially  near  relation  to  Yahweh, 
and  also  because  of  its  cruel  treachery  at  Shechem — that  a 
priestly  tribe  is  likely  to  have  been  not  more,  but  rather  less, 
fierce  than  the  others.  That  would  entirely  depend  upon 
the  cause  or  occasion  which  called  out  the  fierceness.  In 
all  that  concerned  religion  Levi  would  naturally  be  more 
inclined  to  extreme  measures  than  the  other  tribes,  and 
in  this  case  the  higher  morality,  secured  by  the  separate- 
ness  of  Israel,  might  easily  appear  to  be  at  stake.^  It  is, 
therefore,  quite  credible  that  the  excessive  vengeance  taken 
should  have  been  planned  mainly  by  Levi,  and  that  the 
resulting  hatred  should  have  broken  up  Simeon,  and 
driven  back  Levi  with  emphasis  to  its  higher  call. 

In  any  case  there  never  was  again  any  doubt  that  the 
Levites  were  to  be  excluded  from  the  number  of  land- 
owning tribes.  Even  in  the  legislation  regarding  the 
forty-eight  priestly  cities  this  principle  asserts  itself 
The  keeping  of  sheep  and  cattle  on  the  pastures,  which 

'  Cf.  Kittel's  Geschichte  der  Hebrder,  II.,  p.  63. 
^  Cf.  Exod.  xxxii.  15-20 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— II.  THE  PRIEST  325 

were  the  only  lands  attached  to  these  cities,  was  to  be  the 
Levites'  only  secular  occupation,  and  they  were  neither 
to  own  nor  work  agricultural  land.  But  to  compensate 
for  any  hardship  this  arrangement  might  bring  with  it,  the 
Levites,  as  the  special  servants  of  Yahweh,  were  to  have 
Him  for  their  inheritance,  i.e.  as  we  have  seen,  the  dues 
coming  to  Yahweh  were  to  become  the  property  of  the 
Levites  in  great  part.  I  say  in  great  part,  because  the  gift 
to  the  Levites  exclusively  of  a  tithe  of  the  income  of  the 
people  is  thought  by  many  to  be  only  a  late  provision. 

After  Canaan  had  been  conquered,  the  state  of  things 
in  connection  with  the  priesthood  would  be  something  like 
this.  The  tent  with  the  ark  would  be  the  principal 
sanctuary,  served  by  a  hereditary  Levitic  priesthood, 
at  the  head  of  which  would  be  a  descendant  of  Aaron. 
The  tribe  of  Levi,  being  nomadic,  would  probably  encamp 
in  the  neighbourhood  of  the  central  sanctuary  in  part,  and 
recruits  for  the  priestly  work  would  be  taken  occasionally 
from  them,  while  other  sections  would  gravitate  to  the 
neighbourhood  of  other  sanctuaries.  As  we  see  from  the 
story  of  Micah  in  Judges,  it  was  considered  desirable  to 
have  a  Levite  for  priest  everywhere,  and  consequently 
there  would  arise  at  all  the  High  Places  Levitic  priest- 
hoods, most  probably  in  part  hereditary.  But  notwith- 
standing their  dues,  the  bulk  of  the  tribe,  being  nomads, 
would  be  looked  upon  by  the  agricultural  population  as 
poor,  just  as  the  Bedouin,  in  Palestine  now  are,  compar- 
atively speaking,  very  poor.  This  state  of  things  would 
correspond  entirely  with  what  Deuteronomy  tells  us ;  and 
after  that  legislation  the  position  of  the  Levites  as  a  priestly 
body  would  be  more  assured  than  ever.  In  the  post-exilic 
period  all  that  had  been  regulated  by  practice  in  earlier 
days  found  written  expression.  Differentiation  of  function 
was  minutely  carried  out.  The  priesthood  was  confined 
rigorously  to  the  Aaronic  house,    and  the  other  Levites 


326  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

were  given  to  them  as  attendants.  In  this  way  the  whole 
Levitic  system  was  introduced,  and  with  the  exclusive 
altar  came  the  exclusive  priesthood.  So  far  as  I  can  see, 
it  is  only  by  some  such  hypothesis  that  justice  can  be  done 
to  all  the  statements  of  Scripture ;  and  considering  the 
elastic  nature  of  Old  Testament  law,  there  is  nothing 
improbable  in  it.  In  any  case  there  is  an  amount  of 
evidence  of  various  kinds  for  the  Mosaic  origin  of  the 
Levitic,  and  even  the  Aaronic  priesthood,  which  no  proof 
of  irregularities  can  overturn. 

In  the  Divinely  sanctioned  arrangements  of  the  Old 
Testament  Church,  therefore,  the  existence  of  a  body  of 
ecclesiastical  persons,  having  little  share  in  the  ordinary 
pursuits  of  their  neighbours,  and  dependent  upon  their 
clerical  duties  for  a  large  part  of  their  maintenance,  was 
deemed  necessary  to  secure  the  continuity  of  worship  and 
religious  belief.  As  has  been  already  pointed  out,  the 
priesthood  v/as  necessarily  more  conservative  than  pro- 
gressive. As  an  institution,  it  was  suited  rather  to  gather 
up  and  perpetuate  the  results  of  religious  movements 
otherwise  originated,  than  to  originate  them  itself.  But 
in  that  sphere  it  was  an  absolutely  necessary  element  in  the 
life  of  Israel.  Difficult  as  it  was  to  permeate  the  people 
with  the  truths  of  revealed  religion,  it  would  have  been 
impossible  without  the  services  of  the  priestly  tribe. 
Wherever  they  went  they  were  a  visible  embodiment  of 
the  demand  for  faithfulness  to  Yahweh,  and,  with  all  their 
aberrations,  they  probably  lived  at  a^  higher  spiritual  level 
than  the  average  layman.  As  has  been  well  said,  though 
Malachi  had  much  reason  to  complain  of  the  priests  in  his 
own  day,  his  estimate  of  what  Levi  had  been  in  the  past 
is  no  exaggeration  (ii.  6)  :  ''  The  law  of  truth  was  in  his 
mouth,  and  unrighteousness  was  not  found  in  his  lips  :  he 
walked  with  Me  in  peace  and  uprightness,  and  did  turn 
many    away   from   iniquity."     But   such   a    body  as  the 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— 11.  THE  PRIEST  327 

Levites  could  not  have  been  kept  thus  spiritually  ahve, 
unless  the  members  of  it  had  lived  somewhat  aloof  from 
the  strifes  and  envies  of  the  market-place,  and  this  they 
could  not  have  done  had  they  not  lived  by  their 
sacred  function.  The  prophets,  under  the  power  and 
impulse  of  new  truth  adapted  to  their  own  time,  did  not 
need  this  protection ;  consequently  some  of  them  were 
called  from  ordinary  secular  work — from  the  plough,  like 
Elisha,  or  from  the  midst  of  the  rich  and  highborn 
inhabitants  of  Jerusalem,  like  Isaiah.  If  one  may  so  say, 
they  were  men  of  religious  genius ;  while  the  bulk  of  the 
priests  and  Levites  must  always  have  been  commonplace 
men  in  comparison.  Yet  even  of  the  prophets  a  number 
were  trained  in  the  nomadic  life ;  others  were  priests  who 
were  shut  off  also  from  agriculture.  Clearly,  therefore, 
some  measure  of  separation  from  the  full  pulsing  life  of 
the  world  was,  even  in  the  most  favourable  circumstances, 
helpful  in  developing  religious  character.  For  the  ordinary 
average  ecclesiastic  it  was  indispensable ;  and  that  he 
should  exist,  and  should  live  at  as  high  a  level  as  possible, 
was  as  much  a  condition  of  Israel's  discharge  of  her  great 
mission,  as  that  the  voice  of  the  prophet  should  be  heard 
at  all  the  great  turning-points  of  her  career. 

The  modern  tendency  in  Old  Testament  study  is  to 
depreciate  the  priest  and  to  exalt  the  prophet,  just  as 
in  ecclesiastical  life  we  tend  to  make  much  of  those 
who  are  or  give  themselves  out  to  be  religious  reformers 
and  thinkers,  and  to  make  little  of  the  ordinary  parish  or 
congregational  ministry.  But  the  good  done  by  the  latter 
is,  and  must  be,  for  each  individual  generation  more  than 
that  done  by  the  former.  No  one  can  estimate  too  highly 
the  conserving  and  elevating  effect  of  a  faithful  high- 
minded  spiritual  minister.  Often  without  genius  either 
intellectual  or  religious,  without  much  speculative  power, 
with  so  firm  a  hold   of  the  old    truth,  which   has   been 


328  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

their  own  guiding  star,  that  they  cannot  readily  see 
the  good  in  anything  new,  such  men,  when  faithful  to 
the  light  they  have,  are  the  stable,  restful,  immediately 
effective  element  in  all  Church  life.  And  such  a  body 
can  be  best  spiritualised  by  being  separated  somewhat 
from  the  stress  and  strain  of  competition  in  the  race  of 
life.  Being  what  they  are,  the  necessity  of  taking  their 
full  part  in  the  business  of  the  world  would  inevitably 
secularise  them,  to  the  great  and  lasting  damage  of  all 
spiritual  interests.  For  though  to  modern  students  of 
Old  Testament  religion,  who  are  interested  most  in  its 
growth  and  progress  towards  its  consummation  in  Chris- 
tianity, the  prophet  is  by  far  the  most  interesting  figure'y 
to  the  ancient  people  itself  it  must  have  seemed  that  the 
priests  and  Levites,  if  they  in  any  degree  deserved 
Malachi's  eulogy,  were  the  entirely  indispensable  element 
in  their  religious  life.  They  gave  the  daily  bread  of 
religion  to  the  people.  They  embodied  the  principles 
which  came  to  them  from  prophetic  inspiration  in 
ceremonies  and  institutions ;  they  treasured  up  whatever 
had  been  gained,  and  kept  the  people  nurtured  in  it  and 
admonished  by  it.  In  short,  they  prepared  the  soil  and 
cultivated  the  roots  from  which  alone  the  consummate 
flower  of  prophecy  could  spring  ;  and  when  the  voice  of 
prophecy  was  dying  away  they  brought  the  piety  of  the 
average  Israelite  to  the  highest  point  it  ever  reached. 

In  modern  times  the  necessity  for  such  a  body  of 
special  churchmen  is  challenged  from  two  opposite  sides. 
There  is,  on  the  one  hand,  the  body  of  over-spiritualised 
believers  who  abhor  organisation,  and  the  machinery  of 
organisation,  as  if  it  were  an  intolerable  evil.  Conscious 
very  often  of  quick  spiritual  impulse  and  vivid  life  in 
themselves,  they  fret  against  the  slow  movements  of  large 
bodies  of  men ;  they  separate  themselves  from  all  the 
organised    Churches  and   reject    a  regular  ministry.     All 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— 11.  THE  PRIEST  329 

the  Lord's  people  are  now,  under  the  Christian  dispensa- 
tion, priests  and  prophets,  they  say,  and  a  separate  paid 
ministry  in  sacred  things  they  refuse  to  hear  of.  For 
spiritual  nourishment  they  rely  solely  upon  the  prophetic 
gifts  of  their  members,  and  are  satisfied  that  thus  they 
are  preparing  the  way  for  the  universal  prevalence  of  a 
higher  form  of  Church  life.  But,  so  far  as  can  be  judged, 
their  experiment  has  not  prospered,  nor  is  it  likely  to  do 
so.  For  these  separatist  Christians  have  found  that 
spiritual  life,  like  other  kinds  of  hfe,  cannot  express  itself 
without  an  organism.  That  implies  organisation ;  and 
though  they  do  with  less  of  it  than  other  Christians, 
still  they  are  often  driven  into  arrangements  which  really 
bring  back  the  regular  ministry  with  its  separate  position  ; 
and  in  other  respects  they  are  saved  from  the  incon- 
veniences they  have  fled  from,  only  by  their  want  of 
success.  If  their  system  ever  became  general,  it  would 
necessarily  drift  into  organisation,  for  only  at  that  price 
can  any  coherent,  continuous,  and  lasting  effect  be 
produced.  Unfettered  by  the  dull,  the  critical,  and  the 
judicious,  the  impulsive  and  enthusiastic  would  always 
be  outrunning  the  possibilities  of  the  present  time.  In 
the  interests  of  the  best,  they  would  be  continually 
ignoring  or  destroying  the  good.  To  prevent  that,  a 
special  body  of  religious  men  set  apart  for  sacred  services, 
and  freed  from  the  rough  struggle  for  existence  so  far  as 
a  maintenance  from  funds  devoted  to  religious  purposes 
can  free  them,  is  one  of  the  best  provisions  known. 
Where  in  the  mass  they  are  really  religious  men,  they 
secure  that  the  pressure  upward,  which  the  Church  exerts 
upon  the  lives  of  its  own  members  and  upon  the  com- 
munity in  general,  shall  be  effective  to  the  highest  degree 
then  possible,  and  shall  be  exerted  in  the  directions  in 
which  such  pressure  will  most  fully  answer  to  the  needs 
and  aspirations  of  the  time.     Where,  on  the  contrary,  the 


330  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

mass  of  them  are  secularised,  they  no  doubt  are  a  power 
for  evil ;  but  the  contrast  between  their  profession  and 
their  practice  in  that  case  is  so  shocking,  that  unless 
they  be  supported  by  the  ^Mead  hand"  of  endowments 
with  no  living  spiritual  demand  behind  them,  they  soon 
sink  by  their  own  weight,  to  give  place  to  a  better  type. 
And  even  when  they  are  thus  supported,  though  unfaithful, 
their  calling  in  name  at  least  remains  spiritual,  and  sooner 
than  the  other  elements  in  the  nation  they  are  apt  to  be 
stirred  by  breathings  of  a  new  life. 

The  other  objectors  to  the  regular  ministry  are  those,  in 
the  press  and  elsewhere,  who  demand  of  all  ministers 
that  they  should  be  prophets,  or  inspired  religious 
geniuses,  and,  because  they  are  not,  deny  their  right  to 
exist.  According  to  this  view  every  sermon  that  is  not  a 
new  revelation  is  a  failure,  every  minister  of  the  sanctuary 
who  is  not  a  discoverer  in  religion  is  a  pretender,  every 
one  who  only  exemplifies  and  lives  by  the  power  of  the 
Gospel,  as  it  was  last  formulated  so  as  to  lay  hold  upon 
the  popular  mind,  is  an  obscurantist.  But  no  reasonable 
man  really  believes  this.  Such  reproaches  are  merely  the 
penalty  which  must  be  paid  for  claiming  so  high  a  calling 
as  that  of  an  ambassador  for  Christ.  No  man  can  quite 
adequately  fill  such  a  position ;  and  the  bulk  of  ministers 
of  Christ  know  better  than  others  how  much  below  their 
ideal  their  real  service  is.  But  this  also  is  true,  that,  take 
them  all  in  all,  no  class  of  men  are  doing  anything  like  so 
much  as  Christian  ministers  throughout  the  world  are 
doing  to  keep  up  the  standard  of  morals  and  to  keep  alive 
faith  in  that  which  is  spiritual.  We  have  no  right  to 
complain  that  in  their  sphere  they  are  conservative  of  that 
which  has  been  handed  on  to  them.  They  have  tried  and 
proved  that  teaching  ;  they  know  that  wherever  it  secures 
a  foothold  it  lifts  men  up  to  God,  and  they  are  naturally 
doubtful  whether  new  and   untried  teaching  will  do  as 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— II.  THE  PRIEST  331 

much.  They  have  pressing  upon  them,  too,  as  others 
have  not,  the  interest  of  individual  men  and  women  whom 
they  see  and  know,  men  and  women  who  for  the  most 
part,  and  so  far  as  they  can  see,  are  accessible  to  spiritual 
impulse  only  on  lines  with  which  they  are  familiar ; 
and  they  dread  the  diversion  of  their  thoughts  from  their 
real  spiritual  interests,  to  matters  which,  for  them  at  least, 
must  remain  largely  intellectual  and  speculative.  No 
doubt  it  would  be  well  if  all  pastors  could,  as  the  most 
highly  endowed  do,  look  beyond  that  narrower  field  ;  could 
take  account  of  the  movements  which  are  drifting  men 
into  new  positions,  from  which  the  old  landmarks  cannot 
be  seen  and  consequently  exert  no  influence ;  and  could 
endeavour  to  rethink  their  Christianity  from  new  points  of 
view,  which  may  be  about  to  become  the  orthodoxy  of  the 
next  generation.  But  no  ministry  will  ever  be  a  ministry 
of  prophets.  It  may  even  be  doubted  whether  such  a 
ministry  could  be  borne  if  it  ever  should  arise.  Under  it 
one  might  fear  that  spiritual  repose  and  spiritual  growth 
would  alike  be  impossible  for  the  average  man,  in  his 
breathless  race  after  teachers  each  of  whom  was  always 
catching  sight  of  new  lights.  The  mass  of  men  need, 
first  of  all,  teachers  who  have  firmly  seized  the  common 
truth  by  which  the  Church  of  their  day  lives,  who  live 
conspicuously  nearer  the  Christian  ideal,  as  generally 
conceived,  than  others  do,  who  devote  themselves  in 
sincerity  and  self-sacrifice  to  the  work  of  making  the 
things  that  are  most  surely  believed  among  Christians  a 
common  and  abiding  possession.  Such  men  need  never 
be  ashamed  of  themselves  or  of  their  calling.  Theirs  is 
the  foundation  work,  so  far  as  any  attempt  to  realise  the 
Kingdom  of  God  on  earth  is  concerned ;  for  without  the 
general  acceptance  of  the  truth  attained  which  they  bring 
about,  no  further  attainment  would  be  possible.  The 
very  environment  out  of  which  alone  the  prophet  could  be 


332  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

developed  would   be  wanting,  and  stagnation  and  death 
would  certainly  and  necessarily  follow. 

One  other  thing  remains  to  be  said.  Though  we  have 
taken  these  significant  words  of  ver.  2 — **And  they  shall 
have  no  inheritance  among  their  brethren  :  Yahweh  is 
their  inheritance,  as  He  hath  spoken  unto  them  " — in  their 
first  and  most  obvious  reference,  it  is  not  to  be  supposed 
that  that  meaning  has  exhausted  all  that  the  words  con- 
veyed to  ancient  Israel.  The  perpetuation  of  the  nomadic 
form  of  life  among  the  Levites,  and  the  bestowal  of  tithes 
and  sacrificial  meats  upon  them,  was  undoubtedly  the  first 
purpose  of  this  command.  But  it  had,  even  for  ancient 
Israel,  a  more  spiritual  meaning.  Just  as  in  the  promise 
of  Canaan  as  a  dwelling-place  the  spiritual  Israelite  never 
regarded  merely  the  gift  of  wealth  and  the  prospect  of 
comfort, — Canaan  was  always  for  them  Yahweh's  land, 
the  land  where  they  would  specially  live  near  Him 
and  find  the  joy  of  His  presence, — so  in  this  case  the 
spiritual  gift,  of  which  the  material  was  only  an  expres- 
sion, is  the  main  thing.  To  have  Yahweh  for  their 
heritage  can  never  have  meant  only  so  much  money  and 
provisions,  so  much  leisure  and  opportunity  for  contempla- 
tion, to  any  true  son  of  Levi.  Otherwise  it  is  inexplicable 
how  the  words  used  to  indicate  this  very  earthly  thing 
should  have  become  so  acceptable  a  formula  for  the  deepest 
spiritual  experience  of  Christian  men.  It  meant  also  a 
spiritual  bond  between  Yahweh  and  His  servants — a  special 
nearness  on  their  part,  and  a  special  condescension  on 
His.  To  the  other  tribes  Yahweh  had  given  His  land, 
to  them  He  had  given  Himself  as  a  heritage ;  and 
though  doubtless  any  unspiritual  son  of  Levi  must  have 
thought  the  tangible  advantages  of  a  fertile  farm 
more  attractive  than  visionary  nearness  to  God,  the 
spiritual  among  the  Levites  must  have  felt  that  they  had 
received  the  really  good  part,  which  no  hostile  invasion, 


xviii.  1-8.]    SPEAKERS  FOR   GOD.— II.  THE  PRIEST  333 

no  oppression  of  the  rich,  could  ever  take  away.  Their 
ordinary  life-work  brought  them  more  into  contact  with 
sacred  things  than  others.  The  goodness,  the  mercy,  the 
love  of  God  were,  or  at  least  ought  to  have  been,  clearer 
to  them  than  to  their  brethren ;  and  the  joy  of  doing 
good  to  men  for  God's  sake,  the  rapture  of  contempla- 
tion which  possessed  them  when  they  were  privileged  to 
see  the  face  of  God,  must  have  made  all  the  coarser 
benefits  of  the  earthly  heritage  seem  worse  than  nothing 
and  vanity.  Of  course  there  was  the  danger  that 
familiarity  with  religious  things  should  dull  instead  of 
quickening  the  insight ;  and  many  passages  in  the  Old 
Testament  show  that  this  danger  was  not  always  escaped. 
But  often,  and  for  long  periods,  it  must  have  been  warded 
off;  and  then  the  superiority  of  God's  gift  of  Himself 
must  have  been  manifest,  not  only  to  the  chosen  tribe,  but 
to  all  Israel.  For  the  nature  of  man  is  too  intrinsically 
noble  ever  to  be  quite  satisfied  with  the  world,  and  the 
riches  and  comforts  of  the  world,  for  its  inheritance.  At 
no  time  has  man  ever  failed  to  do  homage  to  spiritual  gifts. 
Even  to-day,  in  spheres  outside  of  religion,  there  are 
multitudes  of  men  and  women  who  would  put  aside  with- 
out a  sigh  any  wealth  the  world  could  give,  if  it  were 
offered  as  a  substitute  for  their  delight  in  poetry,  or  for 
their  power  to  rethink  and  re-enjoy  the  ideas  of  those 
whose  ''  thoughts  have  wandered  through  eternity."  And 
the  power  to  follow  and  to  yield  oneself  up  to  the  thoughts 
of  the  Eternal  God  Himself  is  a  reward  far  above  these. 
To  the  faithful  servant  of  God  at  all  times  and  in  all 
lands  that  joy  has  been  open,  for  God  Himself  has  been 
their  heritage ;  and  though  in  ancient  Israel  the  beauty 
of  *'  Yahweh  their  God  "  was  not  quite  unveiled,  yet  we 
know  from  the  Psalms  that  many  penetrated  even  then 
to  the  inner  glory  where  God  meets  His  chosen,  and  there, 
though  having  nothing,  yet  found  that  in  Him  they  had  all. 


CHAPTER   XIX 

SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD— III.    THE  PROPHET 
Deut.  xviii.  9-22 

THE  third  of  the  Divine  voices  to  this  nation  was  the 
prophet.  Just  as  in  the  other  Semitic  nations  round 
about  Israel  there  were  kings  and  priests  and  soothsayers, 
there  were  to  be  in  Israel  kings  and  priests  and  prophets  ; 
and  the  first  two  orders  having  been  discussed,  there 
remains  for  consideration  the  prophet,  in  so  far  at  least 
as  he  was  to  be  the  substitute  for  the  soothsayer.  That 
this  parallel  was  in  the  mind  of  the  writer,  and  that  he 
probably  intended  only  to  deal  with  certain  aspects  of  the 
prophetic  office,  is  witnessed  by  the  fact  that  he  introduces 
what  he  has  to  say  regarding  the  prophet  by  a  stern  and 
detailed  denunciation  of  any  dealings  with  soothsayers 
and  wizards.  In  the  earlier  codes  the  same  denunciation 
is  found,  but  the  catalogue  of  names  for  those  who  practised 
such  arts  is  nowhere  so  extensive  as  it  is  here.  In  the 
Book  of  the  Covenant  the  mekhashsheph^  or  magician,  alone 
is  mentioned  (Exod.  xxii.  17);  while  the  peculiar  code 
which  is  contained  in  the  last  chapters  of  Leviticus,^  men- 
tions only  five  varieties  of  sorcerers.  The  Deuteronomic 
list  of  eight  is  thus  the  most  complete ;  and  Dillmann  may 
be  right  in  regarding  it  as  also  the  latest.  But  the  special 
indignation  of  the  writer  of  Deuteronomy  against  these 
forms  of  superstition  would  be  quite  sufficient  to  account  for 

'  Only  two  in  any  one  law;  Lev.  xviii.  21,  xix.  26,  31,  xx.  6,  27. 

334 


xviii.  9-22.]  SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— III.  THE  PROPHETS      335 

his  elaborate  detail.  If  he  lived  in  the  days  of  Manasseh, 
he  would  have  before  his  eyes  the  passing  of  children 
through  the  fire  to  Moloch.  That  was  connected  with 
soothsaying  and  was  the  crowning  horror  of  Israel's 
idolatry.  The  author  of  Deuteronomy  might,  therefore, 
well  be  more  passionate  and  detailed  in  his  denunciations 
than  others,  whether  earlier  or  later. 

Nor  let  any  one  imagine  that  in  this  he  was  wrong  and 
unenlightened.  Whether  we  believe  in  the  occasional 
appearance  of  abnormal  powers  of  the  soothsaying  kind 
or  not,  it  is  evident  that  in  every  nation's  Hfe  there  has 
been  a  time  in  which  faith  in  the  existence  of  such  powers 
was  universal,  and  in  which  the  moral  and  spiritual  life 
of  men  has  been  threatened  in  the  gravest  way  by  the 
proceedings  of  those  who  claimed  to  possess  them.  At 
this  hour  the  witch-doctor,  with  his  cruelties  and  frauds, 
is  the  incubus  that  rests  upon  all  the  semi-civilised  or 
wholly  uncivilised  peoples  of  Africa.  Even  British  justice 
has  to  lay  hands  upon  him  in  New  Guinea,  as  the  follow- 
ing extract  from  a  Melbourne  newspaper  will  show : 
"  Divination  by  means  of  evil  spirits  is  practised  to  such 
an  extent  and  with  such  evil  effects  by  the  natives  of 
New  Guinea  that  the  Native  Regulation  Board  of  British 
New  Guinea  has  found  it  necessary  to  make  an  ordinance 
forbidding  it.  The  regulation  opens  with  the  statement, 
'White  men  know  that  sorcery  is  only  deceit,  but  the 
lies  of  the  sorcerer  frighten  many  people ;  the  deceit  of 
the  sorcerer  should  be  stopped.'  It  then  proceeds  to 
point  out  that  it  is  forbidden  for  any  person  to  practise 
or  to  pretend  to  practise  sorcery,  or  for  any  person  to 
threaten  any  other  person  with  sorcery,  whether  practised 
by  himself  or  any  one  else.  Any  one  found  guilty  of 
sorcery  may  be  sentenced  by  a  European  magistrate  to 
three  months'  imprisonment,  or  by  a  native  magistrate 
to  three  days'   imprisonment,  and   he  will   be  compelled 


336  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


to  work  in  prison  without  payment."  Through  the  sorcerer 
attempts  at  advance  to  a  higher  hfe  are  in  our  own  day 
being  rendered  futile ;  at  his  instigation  the  darkest  crimes 
are  committed ;  and  because  of  him  and  the  behefs  he 
inculcates  men  are  kept  all  their  lives  subject  to  bondage. 
So  also  of  old.  The  ancient  soothsayer  might  be  an  im- 
postor in  everything,  but  he  was  none  the  less  dangerous 
for  that.  To  what  depths  of  wickedness  his  practices 
can  bring  men  is  seen  in  the  horrors  of  the  secret 
cult  of  the  negroes  of  Hayti.  Even  when  soothsaying 
and  magic  were  connected  with  higher  religions  than 
the  fetichism  of  the  Haytian  negro,  they  were  still  detri- 
mental in  no  ordinary  degree.  No  worthy  conception  of 
God  could  grow  up  where  these  were  dominant,  and 
toleration  of  them  was  utterly  impossible  for  the  religion 
of  Yahweh. 

The  justice  of  the  punishment  of  death  decreed  against 
wizards  and  witches  in  Scripture  was,  therefore,  quite 
independent  of  the  reality  of  the  powers  such  persons 
claimed.  They  professed  and  were  believed  to  have 
them,  and  thus  they  acquired  an  influence  which  was 
fatal  to  any  real  belief  in  a  moral  and  spiritual  govern- 
ment of  the  world.  They  must  therefore  be  an  "  abomina- 
tion "  to  Yahweh ;  and  as,  in  any  case,  by  the  very  fact 
that  they  were  soothsayers  and  diviners  they  practised 
low  forms  of  idolatry,  those  who  sought  them  must  share 
the  condemnation  of  the  idolater  in  Israel.  In  the  earlier 
days  of  the  sacred  history  there  was  no  enemy  so  subtle, 
so  insidious,  so  difficult  to  meet  as  magic  and  soothsaying. 
Only  by  actual  prohibition,  on  pain  of  death,  could  the 
case  be  adequately  met ;  and  under  these  circumstances 
there  is  no  need  for  us  to  apologise  for  the  Old  Testament 
law,  "  Thou  shalt  not  suffer  a  witch  to  live  "  (Exod.  xxii. 
17).  What  is  aimed  at  here  is  the  profession  on  the  part 
of  any  woman  that  she  had  and  used  these  supernatural 


xviii.  9-22.]   SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— III.  THE  PROPHETS      337 

powers.  This  was  a  crime  against  Israel's  higher  life. 
The  punishment  of  it  had  no  resemblance  to  the  judicial 
cruelties  perpetrated  in  comparatively  modern  times,  when 
the  charge  of  being  a  witch  became  a  weapon  against 
people,  who  for  the  most  part  were  guilty  only  of  being 
helpless  and  lonely. 

But  it  is  characteristic  of  the  large  outlook  of  Deuter- 
onomy that  not  only  is  the  evil  protested  against ;  the 
universal  human  need  which  underlay  it  is  acknowledged 
and  supplied.  Behind  all  the  terrible  aberrations  of 
heathen  soothsaying  and  divination  the  author  saw  hunger 
for  a  revelation  of  the  will  and  purpose  of  God.  That 
was  worthy  of  sympathy,  however  inadequate  and  evil 
the  substitutes  elaborated  for  the  really  Divine  means 
of  enlightenment  were.  So  he  promises  that  the  real 
need  will  be  supplied  by  God's  holy  prophets.  Nothing 
that  savoured  of  ignorance  or  misapprehension  of  God's 
spirituaHty,  or  of  unfaithfulness  to  Yahweh,  could  be 
tolerated  ;  for  Israel's  God  would  supply  all  their  need 
by  a  prophet  from  the  midst  of  them,  of  their  brethren, 
like  unto  Moses,  in  whose  mouth  Yahweh  would  put  His 
words,  and  who  should  speak  unto  them  all  that  He 
should  command  him.  This  is  the  broadest  and  most 
general  legitimation  of  the  prophet,  as  a  special  organ  of 
revelation  in  Israel,  that  the  Scripture  contains.  By  it  he 
is  made  one  of  the  regularly  constituted  channels  of  Divine 
influence  for  his  people.  For  it_is  evidently  not  one  single 
individual,  such  as  the  Messiah,  who  is  here  foretold.  That 
has  been  the  interpretation  received  from  the  earlier  Jews, 
and  cherished  in  the  Church  up  till  quite  modern  times. 
But  as  Keil  rightly  says,  the  fact  that  this  promise  is 
set  against  any  supposed  need  to  have  recourse  to  diviners 
and  wizards,  is  in  itself  sufficient  proof  that  the  prophetic 
order  is  meant.  It  was  not  only  in  the  far-off  Messianic 
time  that  Israel  was  to  find  in  this  Divinely  sent  prophet 

22 


338  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

that  knowledge  of  God's  will  and  purposes  which  it 
needed.  Israel  of  all  times,  tempted  by  the  customs  of 
its  heathen  neighbours  to  go  to  the  diviners,  was  to  have 
in  Yahweh's  prophet  a  continual  deliverance  from  the 
temptation.  That  implies  that  this  Nabhiy  or  prophet  like 
unto  Moses,  was  to  be  continually  recurring,  at  every  turn 
and  crisis  of  this  nation's  career. 

Further,  the  direction  in  the  end  of  the  passage  for 
testing  the  prophets,  whether  they  were  really  sent  of  God 
or  not,  confirms  this  view.  It  would  be  singularly  out 
of  place  in  a  promise  which  referred  to  the  Messiah  in  an 
exclusive  and  primary  fashion.  He  would  never  need 
testing  of  this  sort,  for  He  was  to  be  the  realisation  and 
embodiment  of  Israel's  highest  aspirations.  But  if  the 
passage  means  to  give  the  prophets  a  place  among  the 
national  organs  of  intercourse  with  Yahweh  alongside  of 
the  priests,  the  necessity  of  distinguishing  these  true  and 
Divinely  given  prophets  from  pretenders  was  urgent.  The 
context,  both  before  and  after  the  promise,  seems,  there- 
fore, to  be  decisively  in  favour  of  the  general  reference ; 
and  the  phrases  **  like  unto  me,"  ''  like  unto  thee,"  i.e. 
Moses,  when  carefully  examined,  instead  of  weakening 
that  inference,  strengthen  it.  They  are  not  used  here  as 
the  similar  phrase  is  used  in  Deut.  xxxiv.  lO:  ''And 
there  hath  not  arisen  a  prophet  since  in  Israel  like  unto 
Moses,  whom  Yahweh  knew  face  to  face."  There  the 
closeness  of  Moses*  approach  to  Yahweh  is  the  point  in 
hand,  and  it  is  clearly  stated  that  in  that  regard  Moses 
was  more  favoured  than  any  who  had  succeeded  him. 
But  here  the  comparison  is  between  Moses  and  the  prophets, 
in  so  far  as  mediation  between  Yahweh  and  His  people 
was  concerned.  At  Israel's  own  wish  Moses  had  been 
appointed  to  hear  the  Divine  voice,  Israel  had  said  "  Let 
me  not  hear  again  the  voice  of  Yahweh  my  God,  neither 
let  me  see  this   great  fire   any  more,    that    I   die   not." 


xviii.  9-22.]   SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— III.  THE  PROPHETS     339 


The  prophet  here  promised  was  to  be  like  Moses  in  that  y 
respect,  but  there  is  nothing  to  assert  that  he  would  be 
equal  to  Moses  in  power  and  dignity.     On  all  grounds, 
therefore,  the  reference  to  the  Hne  of  prophets  is  to  be 
maintained. 

Still,  the  interpretation  thus  reached  does  not  exclude — 
it  distinctly  includes— the  Messianic  reference.  If  the 
passage  promises  that  at  all  moments  of  difficulty  and 
crisis  in  Israel's  history,  the  will  of  God  would  be  made 
known  by  a  Divinely  sent  prophet,  that  would  be  specially 
true  of  the  last  and  greatest  crisis,  the  birth  of  the  new 
time  which  the  Messiah  was  to  inaugurate.  Whatever 
fulfilment  the  promise  might  receive  previously  to  that, 
it  could  not  be  perfectly  fulfilled  without  the  advent  of 
Him  whose  office  it  was  to  close  up  the  history  of  the 
present  world,  and  bring  all  things  by  a  safe  transition 
into  the  new  Messianic  world.  That  was  the  greatest 
crisis ;  and  necessarily  the  prophet  who  spoke  for  Yahweh 
in  it  must  be  the  crown  of  the  long  line  of  prophets. 
There  is  still  a  higher  sense  in  which  this  promise  has 
reference  to  the  Messiah.  He  was  to  sum  up  and  realise 
in  Himself  all  the  possibilities  of  Israel.  Now  they  were 
the  prophetic  nation,  the  people  who  were  to  reveal  God 
to  mankind;  and  when  they  proved  prevailingly  false  to 
their  higher  calling,  the  hopes  of  all  who  remained  faithful 
turned  to  that  "true"  Israel  which  alone  would  inherit 
the  promises.  At  one  period,  just  before  and  in  the 
Exile,  the  prophetic  order  would  appear  to  have  been 
looked  upon  as  the  Israel  within  Israel,  to  whom  it  would 
fall  to  accomplish  the  great  things  to  which  the  seed  of 
Abraham  had  been  called.  But  the  author  of  Second 
Isaiah,  despairing  even  of  them,  saw  that  the  destiny  of 
Israel  would  be  accomplished  by  one  great  Servant  of 
Yahweh,  who  should  outshine  all  other  prophets,  as  He 
would  surpass  all  other  Israelite  priests  and  Davidic  kings. 


340  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

As  the  crown  and  embodiment  of  all  that  the  prophets 
had  aspired  to  be,  the  Messiah  alone  completely  fulfilled 
this  promise,  and  consequently  the  Messianic  reference 
is  organically  one  with  the  primary  reference.  They  are 
so  intimately  interwoven  that  nothing  but  violence  can 
separate  them ;  and  thus  we  gain  a  deeper  insight  into 
the  wide  reach  of  the  Divine  purposes,  and  the  organic 
unity  of  the  Divine  action  in  the  world.  These  form 
a  far  better  guarantee  for  the  recognition  of  Messianic 
prophecy  here  than  the  supposed  direct  and  exclusive 
reference  did.  By  not  grasping  too  desperately  at  the 
view  which  more  strikingly  involves  the  supernatural,  we 
nave  received  back  with  "  full  measure  pressed  down  and 
running  over  "  the  assurance  that  God  was  really  speaking 
here,  and  that  this,  Hke  all  the  promises  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment when  rightly  understood,  is  yea  and  amen  in  Christ. 
But  for  our  present  purpose  the  primary  reference  of 
this  passage  to  the  prophetic  line  is  even  more  important 
than  the  secondary  but  most  vital  reference  to  the 
Messiah.  For  it  sets  forth  prophecy  as  the  most  potent 
instrument  for  the  growth  and  furtherance  of  the  religion  of 
Israel.  The  prophet  is  here  declared  to  be  the  successor 
of  Moses,  to  be  the  inspired  declarer  of  the  Divine  will  to 
His  people  in  cases  which  did  not  come  within  the  sphere 
or  the  competency  of  the  priest.  The  latter  was,  as  we 
have  seen,  bound  to  work  within  the  limits  and  on  the 
basis  of  the  revelation  given  by  Moses.  He  was  to  carry 
out  into  execution  what  had  been  commanded,  to  keep 
alive  in  the  hearts  of  the  people  the  knowledge  of  their 
God  as  Moses  had  given  it,  to  give  ^'  Torah  "  from  the 
sanctuary  in  accordance  with  its  principles.  But  here  a  \J 
nobler  office  is  assigned  to  the  prophet.  He  is  to  enlarge 
and  develop  the  work  of  Moses.  The  Mosaic  revelation 
is  here  viewed  as  fundamental  and  normative,  but,  in 
contrast  to  the  views   of  later  Judaism,  as  by  no  means 


xviii.  9-22.]   SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— III.  THE  PROPHETS      341 

complete.  For  the  completion  of  it  the  prophet  is  here 
declared  to  be  the  Divinely  chosen  instrument,  and  he 
is  consequently  assigned  a  higher  position  in  the  purpose 
of  God  than  either  king  or  priest.  He  is  raised  far  above 
the  diviners  by  having  his  calling  lifted  into  the  moral 
sphere ;  and  he  excels  both  the  other  organs  of  national 
life  in  that,  while  they  are  largely  bound  by  the  past,  he 
is  called  of  God  to  initiate  new  and  higher  stages  in  the 
life  of  the  chosen  people.  The  ascending  steps  of  the 
revelation  begun  by  Moses  were  to  be  in  his  hands,  and 
through  him  God  was  to  reveal  Himself  in  ever  fuller 
measure. 

Viewed  thus,  the  prophetic  order  in  Israel  has  a  quite 
unique  character.  It  is  a  provision  for  religious  progress 
such  as  had  no  parallel  elsewhere  in  the  world ;  and 
this  public  acknowledgment  of  its  Divine  right  is  almost 
more  remarkable.  Wherever  elsewhere  in  the  world 
religion  has  been  supposed  to  be  Divinely  given  through 
one  man,  though  modifications  have  indeed  been  made  in 
later  times,  yet  they  have  never  been  anticipated  and  pro- 
vided for  beforehand.  Save  in  the  case  of  Mohammedanism, 
which  borrowed  its  idea  of  the  office  of  the  prophet  from 
Judaism,  there  has  never  been  a  deliberate  admission  that 
God  had  yet  higher  things  to  reveal  concerning  Himself, 
still  less  has  provision  been  made  for  the  coming  of  that 
which  was  new  to  fulfil  the  old.  And  in  modern  times 
the  revealer  of  new  aspects  of  truth  finds  nowhere  a 
welcome.  Instead  of  being  received  as  a  messenger  of 
God,  even  in  the  Christian  Church  he  has  always  to  face 
neglect,  often  persecution,  and  only  if  he  be  unusually 
fortunate  does  he  live  to  see  his  message  received.  But 
in  Israel,  even  in  such  ancient  days  as  those  we  are 
dealing  with,  the  progressive  nature  of  God's  Revelation 
of  Himself  was  acknowledged,  the  reception  of  new  truth 
was  legitimised  and  looked  for,  and  the  highest  place  in 


342  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  earthly  kingdom  of  God  was  reserved  for  those  whom 
God  had  enhghtened  by  it.  It  is  true  of  course  that  the 
nation  as  a  whole  never  acted  in  accordance  with  this 
teaching.  They  did  not  obey  the  command  given  here, 
"  Unto  him  shall  ye  hearken,"  and  reiterated  still  more 
solemnly  in  the  words,  **  And  it  shall  come  to  pass,  that 
whosoever  will  not  hearken  unto  My  words,  which  he  shall 
speak  in  My  name,  I  will  require  of  him."  The  prophets 
for  the  most  part  spoke  to  their  contemporaries  in  vain. 
Where  they  were  not  neglected  they  were  persecuted,  and 
many  sealed  their  testimony  with  their  blood.  But  the 
thought  that  Yahweh  was  educating  His  people  step  by 
step,  and  that  at  all  times  in  their  history  He  would  have 
further  revelations  of  Himself  to  make,  is  familiar  to  this 
writer.  Therefore  he  welcomes  the  thought  of  advance  in 
this  region  of  things,  and  here  solemnly  enrols  those  who 
are  to  be  the  instruments  of  it  among  the  ruling  powers 
of  the  nation. 

Now  in  religious  thought  this  is  quite  unparalleled. 
Tenacious  conservatism,  based  on  the  conviction  that  full 
truth  has  already  been  attained,  has  always  been  the  mark 
of  religious  thinking.  That  a  religious  teacher  should 
be  able  to  see  that  the  light  of  revelation,  like  the  natural 
light,  must  come  gradually,  broadening  by  degrees  into 
perfect  day,  and  that  he  himself  was  standing  only  in  the 
morning  twilight,  is  a  thing  so  remarkable  that  one  is  at  a 
loss  to  account  for  it,  save  on  the  ground  of  the  special 
nature  of  prophetic  enlightenment.  It  was  part  of  the  office 
of  the  prophets  to  foresee  and  foretell  the  future.  Smend 
is  certainly  in  the  right,  as  against  those  who  have  been 
teaching  that  the  prophet  was  merely  a  preacher  of  genius, 
when  he  says  that  "  in  Amos  and  his  successors  prophecy 
is  the  starting-point  of  their  whole  discourse  and  action," 
and  that  *'  all  new  knowledge  which  they  preach  comes  to 
them  from  the  action  of  Yahweh  which  they  foretell.  .  ,  ,. 


xviii.  9-22.]   SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— III.  THE  PROPHETS      343 


Consequently  the  greatness  of  a  prophet  is  to  be  gathered 
from  the  measure  in  which  he  foresees  the  future."  ^ 
This  statement  gives  us  the  truth  that  Hes  between  the 
two  other  extremes ;  for  according  to  it  the  prophet  pro- 
claims and  preaches  religious  truth,  but  he  does  so  on 
the  basis  of  what  he  perceives  that  God  is  about  to  do 
in  the  future.  In  other  words,  he  proclaims  new  truth 
on  the  ground  of  the  revelation  God  is  about  to  make  of 
Himself,  which  he  is  inspired  to  foresee  and  to  interpret. 
His  business  is  neither  all  foreseeing  nor  all  teaching  ; 
it  is  teaching  grounded  upon  foresight.  Consequently  it 
was  impossible  for  the  prophet  to  believe  that  change 
in  religion  was  in  itself  evil.  He  knew  to  the  contrary. 
Only  change  which  should  remove  men  from  the  Divinely 
given  basis  of  the  faith  was  evil ;  and  such  change, 
whatever  credentials  might  accompany  it,  even  though 
they  might  be  miraculous,  every  faithful  Israehte  had 
been  already  warned  most  sternly  to  reject  (Deut.  xiii.  5). 
But  when  the  impulse  to  advance  came  from  Yahweh's 
manifestation  of  Himself,  change  was  not  only  good,  it 
was  the  indispensable  test  of  faithfulness.  They  were 
not  the  true  followers  of  Isaiah  who,  on  the  ground  of 
his  prophecy  that  Zion,  as  Yahweh's  dwelling-place, 
should  be  delivered  from  destruction,  rejected  the  prophecy 
of  Jeremiah  that  Zion  would  fall  before  the  Chaldeans. 
The  really  faithful  men  were  those  who  had  taken  to 
heart  the  lessons  Yahweh  had  set  for  His  people  in  the 
century  that  la}^  between  these  two  prophets  ;  who  saw 
that  the  time  when  the  deliverance  of  Zion  was  necessary 
to  the  safety  of  the  true  religion  was  past,  and  that  now 
the  capture  of  Zion  was  necessary  to  its  true  development. 
And  that  is  not  a  solitary  case ;  it  is  an  example  of  what 
was  normal  in  the  religious  history  of  this  people. 

'  Lehrbitch  c(er  Alt-Testamentlicheri,  Religions  Gcschichtc,  pp.  169  ft". 


344  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

This  did  not  escape  the  quick  eye  of  John  Stuart 
Mill.  He  says  the  religion  of  Israel  '*  gave  existence 
to  an  inestimably  precious  unorganised  institution — 
the  order  (if  it  may  be  so  termed)  of  prophets.  .  .  . 
Religion,  consequently,  was  not  there,  what  it  has 
been  in  so  many  other  places,  a  consecration  of  all 
that  was  once  established,  and  a  barrier  against  further 
improvement."  There  always  was  the  movement  of 
pulsing  life  within  it,  and  under  the  Divine  guidance  that 
movement  was  always  upward.  At  some  times  it  was 
comparatively  shallow  and  slow,  at  others  it  was  a  deep 
and  rushing  tide.  But  it  was  always  moving  in  directions 
which  led  straight  to  the  great  consummation  of  itself  in 
the  coming  of  Christ,  who  gathered  up  into  His  own  life 
all  the  varied  streams  of  revelation,  and  crowned  and 
fulfilled  them  all.  At  no  point  in  the  progress  from  Moses 
to  the  Messiah  do  we  touch  rounded  and  completed  truth ; 
nor,  according  to  the  teaching  of  Scripture  in  this  passage, 
were  we  meant  to  do  so.  The  faithful  among  Israel 
had  as  their  watchword  the  disio  and  pace  of  Dante. 
They  saw  before  them  a  world  of  Divine  "  peace,"  which 
they  knew  lay  still  in  the  future,  and  the  "desire"  and 
yearning  of  their  souls  were  always  directed  towards  it. 
With  inextinguishable  hope  they  marched  onward  with 
uplifted  faces,  to  which  light  reflected  from  that  future 
gave  at  times  a  radiant  gladness ;  and  always  they  kept  an 
open  ear  for  those  who  saw  what  God  was  about  to  do  at 
each  turning  of  the  way. 

But  granting  that  religion  was  thus  progressive  before 
men  were  spoken  unto  "  by  the  Son,"  can  we  say  or 
believe  that,  now  that  He  has  spoken,  progress  in  this 
way  is  still  possible  ?  At  first  sight  it  would  seem 
necessary  to  answer  that  question  in  the  negative.  The 
progressive  revelation  of  God  has  come  to  its  perfection 
in  Jesus  Christ ;  what  then  remains  to  us  but  to  cHng  to 


xviii.9-23.]   SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.- III.  THE  PROPHETS      345 

that  ?  Are  we  not  bound  to  make  resistance  to  progress, 
to  any  new  view  in  religion,  our  first  duty  ?  Many  act 
and  speak  as  if  that  were  the  only  possible  course  consist- 
ent with  faithfulness.  But  we  must  distinguish.  The 
revelation  of  God  has,  according  to  our  Christian  faith, 
reached  not  only  its  highest  actual  point,  but  also  its 
highest  possible  point  in  Christ.  God  can  do  nothing  more 
for  His  vineyard  than  He  has  done.  As  a  manifestation 
of  God,  revelation  is  completed  and  closed  in  Christ.  For 
it  is  impossible  to  manifest  God  to  men  more  fully  than 
in  a  man  who  reveals  God  in  every  thought  and  word 
and  act. 

But  it  is  quite  otherwise  with  the  interpretation  of  the 
manifestation.  In  the  earlier  days  this  was  provided  for 
by  a  special  inspiration  of  God,  which  made  the  holy  men 
of  old  infallible  in  their  interpretation  of  the  revelation 
received  up  to  their  day,  and  that  continued  till  the 
establishment  of  the  Church.  Since  then  the  Holy  Spirit 
is  to  be  the  guide  of  faithful  men  into  all  truth.  Now  in 
the  way  of  interpreting  Christ  and  His  message  progress 
is  as  much  open  to  us  as  it  was  to  Israel.  A  complete 
revelation  of  God  must  necessarily,  at  any  given  time  up 
till  the  consummation  of  all  things,  contain  in  it  a  residuum 
of  significance  which,  at  that  point  of  their  experience, 
mankind  has  not  felt  the  need  of,  nor  has  had  the 
capacity  to  understand.  As  the  world  grows  older, 
however,  new  outlooks,  new  environments,  new  circum- 
stances continually  appear,  and  they  all  insist  upon  being 
dealt  with  by  the  Church.  In  order  to  deal  with  them 
adequately  and  worthily,  a  faithful  Church  must  turn 
to  Christ  to  see  what  God  would  have  it  do ;  and  if 
Christ  be  what  we  take  Him  to  be,  there  will  issue  from 
Him  a  light,  unseen  or  unnoticed  before,  to  meet  the 
hitherto  unfelt  need.  Moreover,  while  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ  reveals  God  completely  as  the  God  of  Redemption, 


346  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

and  throws  light  upon  all  God's  relations  to  man,  a  light 
which  needs  and  admits  of  no  supplementary  addition, 
there  are  other  aspects  of  the  Divine  character  which  He 
does  not  so  entirely  reveal.  For  example,  God's  relations 
to  the  world  of  nature,  which  are  now  being  unveiled  in  a 
most  striking  manner,  are  dealt  with  comparatively  rarely 
in  the  Gospels.  Are  we  to  shut  our  eyes  to  these  as  of 
no  importance,  and  to  allow  them  no  influence  upon  our 
thoughts  ?  Surely  that  cannot  be  demanded  of  us  ;  for, 
to  speak  plainly,  it  is  impossible.  No  one  can  remain 
unmoved  when  God  and  man  are  revealing  themselves  in 
the  wondrous  panorama  of  the  world's  life. 

Even  those  who  most  profess  to  do  so  in  no  case  take 
their  stand  simply  and  solely  upon  the  truths  believed  and 
held  by  the  first  Christians.  All  of  them  have  adopted 
later  developments  as  part  of  their  indefeasible  treasure. 
Some  go  back  to  the  theology  of  the  great  Evangelical 
Revival  only  ;  some  to  the  Reformation  ;  some  to  the  pre- 
Reformation  Scholastics  ;  others  to  the  first  five  centuries. 
But  whatever  the  point  may  be  at  which  they  take  up 
Christian  theology,  they  take  up,  along  with  the  original 
creed  of  the  first  believers,  some  truths  or  doctrines  which 
emerged  and  were  accepted  at  a  later  date.  Themselves 
being  judges,  therefore,  additions  to  the  primitive  deposit 
of  faith  have  to  be  admitted  ;  and  it  is  a  purely  arbitrary 
proceeding  on  their  part  to  say  that  now  we  have  attained 
to  all  truth,  and  stolid  conservatism  is  henceforth  the  only 
faithful  attitude.  No,  we  have  still  a  living  God  and  a 
living  Church,  and  a  multifarious  and  wonderful  world  to 
deal  with.  Interaction  of  these  cannot  be  avoided,  nor 
can  it  occur  without  new  truth  being  evolved.  To  have 
ears  and  not  to  hear,  to  have  eyes  and  not  to  see,  must  be 
as  offensive  to  God  now  as  it  was  in  Old  Testament  times. 
Though  we  have  now  no  inspired  prophets  to  foresee 
and  interpret,  we  have  in  all  our  Churches  men  whose  ears 


xviii.9-22.]   SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— III.  THE  PROPHETS      347 

are  better  attuned  to  the  celestial  harmony  than  others, 
whose  eyes  have  a  keener  and  surer  insight  into  what  God 
the  Lord  would  speak ;  and  we  ought  to  hear  them,  to  see 
at  least  whether  they  can  make  their  position  good.  To 
reject  their  teaching,  only  because  some  element  or  aspect 
of  it  is  new,  is  to  deny  the  guiding  providence  of  God,  to 
turn  our  back  upon  the  rich  stores  of  instruction  which  the 
facts  of  history,  both  secular  and  religious,  are  fitted  to 
impart.  That  can  never  be  a  Christian  duty.  Even  if  it 
were  possible  it  would  be  futile.  The  light  will  be  received 
by  the  younger,  the  fresher  and  less  stereotyped  natures 
in  all  the  Churches ;  and  those  who  refuse  it,  in  holding 
obstinately  and  with  exclusive  devotion  to  what  they 
have,  will  find  it  shrink  and  shrivel  in  their  hand.  Only 
in  the  rush  and  conflict,  only  amid  the  impulses  and  the 
powers  which  are  moving  in  the  world,  can  a  healthy 
religion  breathe.  Doubtless  new  teaching  will  come  to  us 
in  ways  congruous  to  the  completed  Revelation  of  our 
Redeeming  God ;  but  it  will  come ;  and  it  should  be 
welcomed  as  gladly  as  the  teaching  of  the  prophets  was 
welcomed  by  faithful  men  in  Israel.  If  it  be  not,  then 
the  Divine  threat  will  apply  in  this  case  as  fully  as  in 
the  other :  "  Whosoever  will  not  hearken  unto  My  words 
which  he  shall  speak  in  My  name,  I  will  require  it  of  him." 
Many  say  now,  and  at  all  times  many  have  said,  to 
those  who  had  caught  glimpses  of  some  new  lesson  God 
was  desiring  to  teach  :  "  You  admit  that  souls  have  been 
renewed  and  character  built  up  and  spiritual  life  preserved 
without  this  new  teaching.  Why  then  can  you  not  let  us 
alone  ?  In  your  pursuit  of  the  best  you  may  destroy  the 
good ;  and  no  harm  can  happen  if  you  keep  the  improved 
faith  to  yourself."  But  they  have  forgotten  Yahweh's 
solemn  "Whosoever  will  not  hearken,  I  will  require  it  of 
him."  If  we  refuse  to  hear  when  the  Lord  hath  spoken, 
evil  must  come  of  it.     Indeed,  though  the  evils  of  heresy 


348  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

may  be  more  dramatically  and  strikingly  manifest,  those 
of  stagnation  and  a  refusal  to  learn  may  be  much  more 
destructive  of  the  common  faith.  For  refusal  to  acknow- 
ledge truth  has  far  wider  issues  than  the  loss  of  any 
particular  truth.  It  indicates  and  reinforces  an  attitude 
of  soul  which,  if  persisted  in,  will  allow  the  Church  that 
adopts  it  to  drift  slowly  away  from  living  contact  with  the 
minds  of  men.  So  drifting,  it  shrinks  into  a  coterie,  and  its 
every  activity  becomes  infected  with  the  curse  of  futility. 

On  both  sides,  therefore,  there  is  danger  for  us,  as  there 
was  for  the  Old  Testament  Church ;  and  we  turn  with 
quickened  interest  to  the  test,  the  criterion,  by  which 
Deuteronomy  would  have  the  prophets  tried.  It  puts  the 
very  question  which  the  line  of  thought  we  have  been 
pursuing  could  not  fail  to  suggest :  "  How  shall  we  know 
the  w^ord  which  Yahweh  hath  not  spoken?  "  If  a  prophet 
spoke  in  the  name  of  other  gods  he  was  to  die ;  that  had 
already  been  determined  in  the  thirteenth  chapter,  and  it 
is  repeated  here.  But  the  prophet  who  should  speak  a 
word  presumptuously  in  the  name  of  Yahweh,  which  He 
had  not  commanded,  was  to  be  in  the  same  condemnation. 
It  was,  therefore,  of  the  last  importance  that  there  should 
be  means  of  detecting  when  this  last  evil  occurred.  The 
test  is  this  :  "  When  a  prophet  speaketh  in  the  name  of 
Yahweh,  if  the  thing  follow  not,  nor  come  to  pass,  that  is 
the  thing  which  Yahweh  hath  not  spoken."  The  strange 
notions  of  Duhm  and  others  in  regard  to  this  have  been 
already  dealt  with  (vide  pp.  248  f ).  There,  too,  it  has  been 
shown  that  the  prophecy  here  spoken  of  must  have  been 
prophecy  in  its  narrower  sense,  prophecy  dealing  with 
promises  of  immediate  judgment  and  deliverance.  Further- 
more, this  is  set  forth  here  as  a  test  applicable  to  prophets 
in  all  ages  of  the  history  of  Israel.  It  lies,  too,  in  the 
nature  of  the  case  that  it  must  always  have  been  the 
popular  test,    The  announcement  of  thing;?  to  come  before 


xviii.9-22.]   SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— III.  THE  PROPHETS      349 

they  came  was  made,  at  least  partially,  with  the  view  of 
impressing  the  populace,  and  of  gaining  their  confidence 
and  attention.  They  must  consequently  have  been  con- 
tinually on  the  alert  to  apply  this  test,  and  all  that  is  here 
done  is  to  acknowledge  it  in  the  fullest  manner  as  a  right 
and  Divinely  approved  criterion. 

But  the  way  in  which  it  ought  to  be  applied  is  best 
exemplified  by  Jeremiah's  own  method  of  applying  it, 
which,  as  Dr.  Edersheim^  has  pointed  out,  is  to  be  found 
in  the  twenty-eighth  chapter  of  that  prophet's  book.  There 
we  read  of  Jeremiah's  conflict  with  "  Hananiah  the  son  of 
Azzur  the  prophet,"  in  the  beginning  of  the  reign  of 
Zedekiah.  Just  previously  Nebuchadnezzar  had  carried 
away  Jeconiah  the  king  of  Judah,  with  all  the  treasures 
of  the  house  of  Yahweh  and  the  strength  of  the  people. 
Jeremiah  had  prophesied  that  they  would  not  return  ;  nay, 
he  had  foretold  a  further  calamity,  viz.  that  Nebuchad- 
nezzar would  come  again  and  would  take  away  the  people 
and  the  vessels  of  the  house  which  still  remained.  In 
opposition  to  that,  Hananiah  declared,  as  a  word  of 
Yahweh,  ''  Within  two  full  years  will  I  bring  again  into 
this  place  all  the  vessels  of  Yahweh's  house  that 
Nebuchadnezzar  king  of  Babylon  took  away  from  this 
place,  and  carried  them  to  Babylon ;  and  I  will  bring 
again  to  this  place  Jeconiah  the  son  of  Jehoiakim  king  of 
Judah,  with  all  the  captives  of  Judah  that  went  to  Babylon, 
saith  Yahweh."  Jeremiah's  conduct  under  these  circum- 
stances is  noteworthy.  He  did  not  immediately  denounce 
his  rival  as  prophesying  falsely.  He  seems  to  have  thought 
that  possibly  he  might  have  a  true  word  from  Yahweh, 
since,  as  we  see  in  the  Book  of  Jonah,  the  most  positive 
prophecies  were  conditional,  and  Jeremiah  would  seem 
to  have  thought  it  possible  that  personal  repentance  was 

'  Prophecy  and  History  in  Relation  to  the  Messiah,  p.  1 50. 


3S0  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

about  to  bring  upon  the  captive  king  and  people  a  blessing, 
instead  of  the  evil  he  had  foreseen.  He  consequently 
expressed  a  fervent  w^ish  that  Hananiah's  prophecy  might 
come  true,  but  reminded  his  rival  that  the  causes  of  the 
evil  prophecies  of  himself  and  previous  prophets  were  far 
wider  than  the  ground  which  the  personal  repentance  of 
the  captives  could  cover.  Because  of  that  he  evidently 
felt  the  gravest  doubt  about  Hananiah ;  but  he  disposes  of 
the  matter  by  saying,  ''  The  prophet  which  prophesieth  of 
peace,  when  the  word  of  the  prophet  shall  come  to  pass, 
then  shall  the  prophet  be  known,  that  Yahweh  hath  truly 
sent  him."  Only  afterwards,  when  he  had  himself 
received  a  special  revelation  concerning  Hananiah,  did  he 
denounce  him  as  an  impostor  and  a  false  prophet. 

The  whole  narrative  is  of  extreme  importance,  for  it 
shows  us  how  the  prophets  themselves  regarded  their  own 
supernatural  powers,  and  how  they  used  the  tests  supplied 
in  Deuteronomy.  In  the  first  place,  they  asked  how  the  new 
word  of  Yahweh  stood  in  regard  to  the  older  words  which 
He  had  certainly  spoken.  If  there  was  any  possible  way 
in  which  the  new  and  the  old  could  be  reconciled,  they 
gave  the  new  the  benefit  of  the  doubt,  and  left  the 
decision  to  the  event.  Obviously  had  there  been  no  way 
of  reconciling  Hananiah's  prophecy  with  the  mass  of 
contrary  prophecy  which  had  gone  before,  Jeremiah  would 
have  denounced  him  under  the  law  of  Deut.  xiii.  5  as 
leading  away  from  Yahweh.  As  it  was,  he  fell  back 
upon  the  test  in  this  twenty-eighth  chapter,  and  would 
have  maintained  an  attitude  of  watchful  neutrality  until 
the  event  had  justified  or  condemned  his  rival,  had  not 
Yahweh  Himself  settled  the  question. 

For  our  own  day  and  in  our  different  circumstances 
the  tests  are  radically  the  same,  though,  as  prophecy  is 
extinct  in  the  Church,  they  must  to  some  extent  act 
differently.     The  New  Testament  parallel  to  the  criterion 


xviii.9-22.]  SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.— III.  THE  PROPHETS     351 

in  Deut.  xiii.  5  is  to  be  found  in  I  John  iv.  i,  2,  and  3  : 
^*  Prove  the  spirits,  whether  they  are  of  God :  because 
many  false  prophets  are  gone  out  into  the  world.  Hereby 
know  ye  the  Spirit  of  God :  ever}^  spirit  which  confesseth 
that  Jesus  Christ  is  come  in  the  flesh  is  of  God  :  and 
every  spirit  which  confesseth  not  Jesus  is  not  of  God  : 
and  this  is  the  spirit  of  the  antichrist,  whereof  ye  have 
heard  that  it  cometh."  Under  the  Christian  dispensation 
to  deny  "  that  Jesus  Christ  is  come  in  the  flesh  "  is  the 
same  as  it  was  to  say  under  the  earlier  dispensation  "  Let 
us  go  after  other  gods,"  so  completely  do  God  and  Christ 
coincide  in  our  most  holy  faith.  In  each  case  the 
ultimate  test  of  prophecy  is  to  be  the  fundamental  prin- 
ciple of  the  faith.  Whatever  credentials  teachers  who 
deny  that  may  bring,  they  are  to  be  unhesitatingly 
rejected.  They  belong  to  the  world,  that  scheme  and 
fabric  of  things  which  rejects  allegiance  to  the  Spirit  of 
God.  Least  of  all  is  popularity  with  the  world  as  distin- 
guished from  the  Church,  or  with  the  worldly  portion 
of  the  Church,  to  stand  in  the  way  of  its  rejection.  That 
is  only  the  natural  consequence  of  its  being  ^'  of  the 
world."  Within  the  Church  no  quarter  is  to  be  shown 
to  such  teaching,  for  it  really  carries  with  it  the  absolute 
negation  of  the  faith. 

But  what  of  erroneous  teaching  which  acknowledges 
that  '^  Jesus  Christ  is  come  in  the  flesh  "  ?  To  it  the  Old 
Testament  parallel  is  the  utterance  of  the  prophet  who 
"  speaketh  in  the  name  of  Yahweh,  and  the  thing  follov/eth 
not  nor  comes  to  pass."  According  to  Old  Testamicnt 
precept  and  example,  that  was  to  be  left  to  the  judgment 
of  time.  In  our  day  a  corresponding  course  must  be 
found.  The  case  supposed  is  that  of  teaching  believed 
to  be  erroneous,  but  neither  fundamentally  subversive  of 
Christianity  nor  destructive  of  the  special  principles  of  a 
Church.     If  so,  earnest  opposition  b^  those  who  hold  the 


352  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


opposite  view,  and  adequate  discussion,  are  the  true  way  of 
meeting  the  case.  For  the  rest,  the  final  decision  should 
be  left  to  experience.  In  time,  even  subsidiary  error  of 
this  kind,  if  important,  will  manifest  itself  by  weakening 
spiritual  life  in  those  who  hold  it ;  they  will  gradually 
dwindle  in  numbers  and  their  influence  in  the  Church  will 
die  away.  They  begin  by  promising  renewed  strength  and 
insight  in  spiritual  things,  renewed  energy  in  the  spiritual 
life.  If  that  "follow  not  nor  come  to  pass,"  when  due 
time  has  been  given  for  any  such  development,  then  that 
is  the  thing  which  the  Lord  hath  not  spoken,  and  it 
should  be  dealt  with  as  the  fundamental  heresy  is  to  be 
dealt  with.  But  probably  by  that  time  it  will  have  judged 
itself,  and  will  need  no  judgment  of  men  at  all. 

These  then  were  the  connecting  links  between  Yahweh 
and  His  people,  and  the  organs  by  which  the  life  of  the 
Israelite  nation  was  guided :  the  Kingship,  the  Priesthood, 
and  the  Prophetic  Order.  The  first  gave  visibility  to  the 
Divine  rule,  and  stability  to  national  and  social  life ;  the 
second  secured  the  stability  of  religion,  and  built  up 
the  moral  life  of  the  nation  on  the  basis  of  Mosaic  law ; 
the  third  secured  progress  and  averted  stagnation,  both  in 
religion  and  in  social  and  individual  morals.  In  fact, 
order  and  progress,  the  two  things  Positivist  thinkers  have 
set  forth  as  those  which  can  alone  secure  health  to  a  com- 
munity, are  provided  for  here  with  a  directness  and  success 
which  it  would  be  difficult  to  parallel  elsewhere.  When 
we  remember  how  small,  how  obscure,  and  how  uncivilised 
the  people  was  to  whom  this  scheme  of  things  was  given, 
and  how  little  their  surroundings  or  circumstances  were 
calculated  to  suggest  such  far-reaching  provisions,  we  see 
that  the  source  of  it  all  was  the  Revelation  of  the  Divine 
character  given  by  Moses.  Yahweh  as  revealed  through 
him  did  not  permit  His  worshippers  to  believe  that  they 
could,  at  one  moment,  receive  all  that  was  to  be  known  about 


xviii.9-22.]   SPEAKERS  FOR  GOD.-III.  THE  PROPHETS      353 

Him.     They  were  taught  to  found  their  conduct  and  their 
poHty  upon  what  they  did  know,  and  to  be  eagerly  on  the 
watch  for  that  which  might  be  revealed  at  new  crises  of  their 
history.     Now  that  teaching  finds  its  most  complete  expres- 
sion in  the  laws  concerning  the  three  institutions  we  have 
been  reviewing.     Behind  all  healthy  national  life  and  all 
stable  institutions  there  was,  so  had  this  people  learned, 
the  power  and  the  righteousness  of  Almighty  God.     In 
His  eagerness  to  draw  near  to  men,  He  had  changed  the 
priest,  "the    king,  the    prophet  from  being,  as  they  were 
among  the  heathen,  merely  poUtical  and  religious  officials 
appointed  for  purely  earthly  ends,  into  channels  of  com- 
munication with  Him.     Through  them  there  were  poured 
into  the  life  of  this  nation  wholesome  and  varied  streams 
of  Divine  grace  and  enlightenment,    and    a  just    balance 
between  conservatism  and  reform  in  religion  was  admirably 
secured.     Consequently,  amid  all  drawbacks,  the  Israelites 
became  an  instrument  of  the  finest  power  for  good  in  the 
hands  of  their  Almighty  King  ;  and  even  when  their  outward 
glory  faded,  they    were   inwardly  renewed    and    pressed 
onward   age  after  age.     "Without   hasting   and  without 
resting  "  the  purpose  of  God  was  realised  in  their  history, 
guided  by  these  three  organs  of  their  national  life.     Each 
contributed  its  share  in  preparing  for  the  fulness  of  the 
time  when  He  came  who  was  the  Salvation  of  God,  and 
each  supplied  elements  of  the  most  essential  kind  to  the 
mingled  expectation  which  was  so  marvellously  satisfied 
by  the  life  and  work  of  Christ.     They  wrought  together 
in  the  fullest  harmony,  moreover,  though  they  were  not 
always  conscious  of  doing  so.     For  they   all  moved  at 
the    bidding    of    the    still    small    voice    wherewith    God 
speaks  most  effectively  to  the  souls  of  men.      Because 
of  this    their    purposes    took  a   wider    sweep  than    they 
knew,  their  hopes  received  wings  which  carried  them  far 
away'  beyond  the  horizon  of  Old  Testament  time ;  and, 

23 


354  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

starting  from  the  remotest  points,  all  the  streams  of 
the  national  life  converged,  "till,  at  the  close  of  the  Old 
Testament  time,  they  were  running  in  such  directions  that 
they  could  not  fail  in  little  space  to  meet.  It  was  there- 
fore no  surprise  to  the  faithful  in  Israel  when,  at  the 
beginning  of  the  New  Testament,  they  were  found  to  have 
met  in  Jesus  the  Christ.  Once  that  point  was  reached, 
the  whole  former  history,  which  was  now  lying  completed 
before  the  eyes  of  all,  could  be  fully  appreciated.  Ever}^- 
thing  in  the  past  seemed  to  speak  of  Him.  If,  in  that  first 
burst  of  joyous  surprise,  Messianic  references  of  the  most 
definite  kind  were  found  where  we  now  can  see  only  faint 
hints  and  adumbrations,  we  need  not  wonder.  So  much 
more  had  been  spoken  of  Him  than  they  had  thought, 
it  would  have  been  strange  had  they  not  swung  a  little 
to  the  opposite  extreme.  But  that  need  not  hinder  us 
from  acknowledging  that  the  history  of  Israel,  viewed  from 
their  standpoint,  was  and  is  the  most  conspicuous,  the 
most  convincing,  the  most  inspiring  proof  of  the  Divine 
action  in  the  world.  The  finger  of  God  was  so  manifestly 
here^  harmonising,  directing,  impelling,  that  the  evidence 
for  Divine  guidance  in  much  more  obscure  regions 
becomes  irresistible.  With  this  history  before  us  we  can 
believe  that  it  was  not  only  in  those  far-off  days,  and 
in  that  little  corner  of  Asia  that  God  was  active  for  the 
production  of  good.  Now  and  here,  as  well  as  then  and 
there,  there  are  Divine  and  guiding  forces  at  work  in  the 
world  ;  and  the  only  safe  politics,  the  only  truly  prosperous 
peoples,  are  those  in  which  rulers  and  priests  and  prophets 
are  secured,  to  whom  the  secret  of  God  is  open. 


CHAPTER   XX 

THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS  OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE 

IT  has  often  and  justly  been  said  that  the  life  of  Israel 
is  so  entirely  founded  on  the  grace  and  favour  of  God 
that  no  distinction  is  made  between  the  secular  and  the 
religious  laws.  Whatever  their  origin  may  have  been, 
whether  they  had  been  part  of  the  tribal  constitution 
before  Moses'  day  or  not,  they  were  all  regarded  as 
Divinely  given.  They  had  been  accepted  as  fit  building 
stones  for  the  great  edifice  of  that  national  life  in  which 
God  was  to  reveal  Himself  to  all  mankind,  and  behind 
them  all  was  the  same  Divine  authority.  That  being  so, 
it  is  not  wonderful,  in  times  like  these,  when  the  air  is 
full  of  plans  and  theories  for  the  reconstruction  of  society 
in  the  interest  of  the  toiling  masses  of  men,  that  believers 
in  the  Scriptures  should  turn  with  hope  to  the  legislation 
of  the  Old  Testament.  In  the  present  state  of  things  the 
material  conditions  of  life  are  far  more  deadening  and 
demoralising  for  the  multitude  in  civilised  countries  than 
they  are  in  many  uncivilised  lands.  That  this  should  be  so 
is  intolerable  to  all  who  think  and  feel ;  and  men  turn  with 
hope  to  a  scene  where  God  is  teaching  and  training  men, 
not  merely  in  regard  to  their  individual  life,  as  in  the  New 
Testament,  but  also  in  regard  to  national  life.  It  is  seen, 
too,  that  the  tone  and  feeling  of  these  laws  are  sympathetic 
for  the  poor  as  no  other  code  has  ever  been  ;  and  many 
maintain  that,  if  we  would  only  return  to  the  provisions 
of  these  laws,  the  social  crisis  which  is  as  yet  only  in  its 

355 


356  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

beginning,  and  which  threatens  to  darken  and  overshadow 
all  lands,  would  be  at  once  and  wholly  averted.  Men 
consequently  are  diligently  inquiring  what  the  land  tenure 
of  ancient  Israel  was,  what  its  trade  laws  were,  how  the 
poor  were  dealt  with,  and  how  and  to  what  extent 
pauperism  was  averted  or  provided  for.  Many  say,  If 
God  has  spoken  in  and  by  this  people,  so  that  their  first 
steps  in  religion  and  morals  have  been  the  starting- 
point  for  the  highest  life  of  humanity,  may  we  not 
expect  that  their  first  steps  in  political  and  social  life 
will  have  the  same  abiding  value,  if  rightly  understood  ? 
Now  the  main  thing  in  regard  to  which  the  economical 
arrangements  of  a  nation  are  important  is  land.  In 
modern  times  there  may  be  some  exceptionally  situated 
communities,  such  as  the  British  people,  among  whom 
commerce  and  manufactures  are  more  important  than 
agriculture ;  but  in  ancient  times  no  such  case  could  arise. 
In  every  community  the  land  and  the  land  tenure  were 
the  fundamentally  important  things. 

Now  the  fundamental  thing  concerning  it  was  that 
Yahweh,  being  the  King  of  Israel,  who  had  formed  and 
was  guiding  this  people  as  His  instrument  for  saving  the 
world,  and  who  had  bestowed  their  country  upon  them, 
was  regarded  as  the  sole  owner  of  the  soil.  It  is  not 
necessary  to  quote  texts  to  prove  this,  since  it  is  the 
fundamental  assumption  throughout  the  Old  Testament 
Scriptures  that  the  Israelite  title  to  their  land  w^as  the 
gift  of  Yahweh.  He  had  promised  it  to  the  fathers.  He 
had  driven  out  the  Canaanite  nations  before  Israel.  He 
had  by  His  mighty  hand  and  His  stretched-out  arm 
established  His  chosen  people  in  the  place  which  He  had 
chosen,  and  He  had  granted  them  the  use  and  enjoyment 
of  it  so  long  as  they  proved  faithful  to  Him.  Consequently, 
in  a  quite  real  and  palpable  sense,  there  was  no  owner  of 
land  in  Israel  save  Yahweh.     And  this  thought  was  not 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS   OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE      357 

without  practical  consequences  of  great  moment.  It  was 
not  a  mere  religious  sentiment,  it  was  a  hard  and  palpable 
fact,  that  Yahweh  ruled.  Absolute  proprietorship  could 
never  be  built  up  on  that  basis,  and  never  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  was  acknowledged  in  Israel.  All  were  tenants,  who 
held  their  places  only  so  long  as  they  obeyed  the  statutes 
of  Yahweh.  The  sale  in  perpetuity  of  that  which  had  been 
portioned  out  to  tribes  and  families  was  consequently  entirely 
prohibited.  As  against  other  nations,  indeed,  Israel  was 
to  possess  this  land,  so  that  no  heathen  could  be  permitted 
to  buy  and  possess  even  a  scrap  of  it ;  but  as  against 
Yahweh  and  the  purposes  for  which  He  had  chosen  Israel, 
all  were  equally  strangers  and  sojourners,  practically 
tenants  at  will,  who  could  neither  give  nor  take  their 
holdings  as  if  they  were  absolutely  theirs.  Yet,  relatively, 
the  land  was  given  to  the  community  as  a  whole,  and 
according  to  Joshua  xiii.  7  sqq.  (a  passage  generally 
assigned  to  the  Deuteronomic  editor)  it  was  parcelled  out 
by  lot  to  the  various  tribes  just  before  Joshua's  death, 
according  to  their  respective  num.bers.^  Then  within  the 
tribal  domain  the  families  in  the  wider  sense  had  their 
portion,  and  within  these  family  domains  again  the 
individual  households.  In  this  way  the  Israelite  tenure  of 
land  occupies  a  middle  point  between  the  theories  of 
Socialism,  and  the  high  doctrine  of  private  property  in 
land  which  declares  that  the  individual  owner  can  do 
what  he  will  with  his  own.  The  nation  as  a  whole 
claimed  rights  over  all  the  land,  but  it  did  not  attempt  to 
manage  the  public  estate  for  the  common  good.  It  dele- 
gated its  powers  to  the  tribes.  But  not  even  they 
undertook  the  burdens  of  proprietorship.  Under  them 
the  families  undertook  a  general  superintendence ;  but  the 
true  proprietary  rights,  the  cultivation  of  the  soil,  and  the 
drawing  of  profit  from  it,  subject  only  to  deductions  made 

'  Cf  Numb.  xxvi.  53-55  from  P  and  Josh,  xvii,   \/^^.  from  JE, 


3S8  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

by  the  larger  bodies,  the  families,  the  tribes,  and  the 
nation,  were  exercised  only  by  individuals.  The  nation 
took  care  that  none  of  its  territory  should  be  sold  to 
foreigners,  lest  the  national  inheritance  should  be  dimin- 
ished, and  the  tribes  did  the  same  for  the  tribal  heritage, 
as  we  see  from  the  narrative  concerning  the  daughters  of 
Zelophehad.  It  was  only  within  limits  therefore,  that 
the  individual  proprietor  was  free ;  and  though  the  rights 
of  property  were  respected,  the  corresponding  duties  of 
property  were  set  forth  with  irresistible  clearness.  The 
community,  in  fact,  never  abandoned  its  claims  upon  the 
common  heritage,  any  more  than  Israel's  Divine  King  did, 
and  consequently  the  field  within  which  proprietary  rights 
were  exercised  was  more  restricted  here  than  in  any 
modern  state. 

Further,  besides  the  prohibition  of  absolute  sale  which 
flowed  from  the  recognition  of  Yahweh's  ownership,  and 
the  limitations  which  tribal  and  family  claims  involved, 
there  were  distinct  provisions  in  which  the  national  owner- 
ship under  Yahweh  was  plainly  asserted.  For  example, 
it  is  enacted  in  Deut.  xxiii.  24 — "  When  thou  comest  into 
thy  neighbour's  vineyard,  then  thou  mayest  eat  grapes 
thy  fill  at  thine  own  pleasure ;  but  thou  shalt  not  put 
any  in  thy  vessel.  When  thou  comest  into  thy  neighbour's 
standing  corn,  then  thou  mayest  pluck  the  ears  with  thine 
hand ;  but  thou  shalt  not  move  a  sickle  unto  thy  neigh- 
bour's standing  corn."  Allied  to  these  were  the  pro- 
visions (Lev.  xix.  9ff.,  xxiii.  10)  concerning  gleaning, 
and  not  reaping  the  corners  of  the  field.  It  will  be 
observed  that,  though  these  latter  may  be  discounted  as 
intended  for  the  relief  of  the  poor  alone,  the  former 
provision  was  for  all,  and  that  consequently  it  may  be 
regarded  as  an  undoubted  assertion  of  the  common  owner- 
ship, or  common  usufruct^  which,  though  latent,  was  always 
held  to  be  a  fact.     In  other  ways  also  the  same  hint  i§ 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS  OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE     359 

given.  The  provisions  for  letting  the  land  lie  fallow  in 
the  seventh  year  and  in  the  jubilee  year,  and  for  securing 
the  use  of  what  grew  in  the  field  for  all  who  chose  to  take 
it,  were  interferences  with  the  free-will  of  the  individual 
owners  or  occupiers,  which  find  their  justification  only  in 
the  fact  that  the  general  ownership  was  never  suffered 
entirely  to  fall  into  the  background. 

To  sum  up  then  this  system  aimed  at  securing  the  advan- 
tages both  of  the  socialist  view  and  of  the  individualistic 
view,   while  avoiding  the   evils   of  both.     Private  enter- 
prise was  encouraged,  by  the  individual  being  guaranteed 
possession    of   his    land    against    any   other    individual ; 
while    public    spirit    and   a    regard  for   general    interests 
were    promoted    by   the    restrictions    which    limited    the 
private    ownership.      Further,   and   more   important   still, 
the  whole  relation  of  the  nation  and  of  the  individual  to 
the  land  was  raised  out  of  the  merely  sordid  region    of 
material  gain  into  the  spiritual  and  moral  region,  by  the 
principle  that  Yahweh  their  God  alone  had  full  proprietary 
rights  over  the  soil.     All   were  "  sojourners "  with  Him. 
He  had  promised  this  land  to  their  fathers  as  the  place 
wherein    He    should   specially  reveal  Himself    to    them. 
Here,  communion  with  Him  was  to  be  established,  and 
to  each  household  there  had  been  assigned  by  Yahweh  a 
special  portion  of  it,  which  it  would  be  equally  a  sin  and 
an  unspeakable  loss  to  part  with.     Compulsion  alone  could 
justify  such  a  surrender ;  and   the  completed  legislation, 
whatever  its  date,  and  even  if  it  remained  always  an  un- 
realised ideal,  shows   how  determined  the   effort  was   to 
secure  the  perpetuity  of  the  tenure  in  the  original  hands. 
The  ideal  of  Israelite  life  was  consequently  that  the  land 
should  remain  in  the  hands  of  the  hereditary  owners,  and 
that  the  main  support  of  all  the  people  should  be  agricul- 
tural labour. '^ 

'  The  questions   connected  with    the  jubilee  year  are  numerous  and 


36o  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

The  hypothesis  that  this  was  the  case  is  strengthened 
to  a  certainty  by  the  manner  in  which  commerce,  one  of 
the  other  main  sources  of  wealth,  is  dealt  with  in  the 
Israelite  law.  There  is  but  little  sympathy  expressed 
with  it,  and  some  of  the  regulations  issued  are  such  as 
to  render  trade  on  any  very  large  scale  within  Palestine 
itself  impossible.  From  the  use  of  the  word  ''  Canaanite  "  in 
the  Old  Testament  (cf  Job  xli.  6 ;  Prov.  xxxi.  24 ;  Zeph. 
i.  11;  Ezek.  xvii.  4,  and  Isa.  xxiii.  8)  it  is  clear  that, 
even  in  the  later  periods  of  Israelite  history,  the  merchants 
were  so  prevailingly  Canaanites  that  the  two  words  are 
synonymous.  Nay,  more  ;  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the 
commercial  career  was  looked  down  upon.  Even  as  early 
as  the  prophet  Hosea  the  Canaanite  name  is  connected 
with  false  weights  and  vulgar  commercial  cheating  (Hos. 
xii.  7),  and  it  is  looked  upon  as  a  last  degradation  that 
Ephraim  should  take  delight  in  similar  pursuits.  In  all 
that  we  read  of  merchants  in  the  Old  Testament  we  seem 


intricate,  and  it  may  be  for  ever  impossible,  from  lack  of  data,  to  decide 
at  what  period  in  Israelite  history  it  originated,  or  whether  it  was  ever 
actually  observed  ;  but  it  undoubtedl}'  expressed  the  spirit  of  the  Israelite 
legislation  and  customary  law  at  all  times.  It  is  the  natural  culmination 
of  tendencies  and  ideas  which  were  always  present.  That  it  is  not 
mentioned  in  Deuteronomy  at  all  is  surprising,  if  it  had  been  previously 
to  Manasseh's  day  embodied  either  in  custom  or  in  law  ;  yet,  on  the  other 
hand,  there  are  references  in  Ezekiel  and  other  exilic  books  which  are 
almost  unintelligible  except  on  the  supposition  that  the  jubilee  year  was 
a  perfectly  well-known  institution  (cf.  Jer.  xxxiv.  8  ff.  ;  Ezek.  vii.  I2f. ; 
Ezek.  xlvi.  16  flf.  ;  Isa.  Ixi.  I  ff.).  It  is  i-eferred  to  in  a  merely  allusive  way, 
which  implies  that  every  hearer  or  reader  of  the  prophetic  warnings 
would  know  at  once  the  full  scope  and  meaning  of  the  reference.  Now, 
had  the  jubilee  year  been  unknown  before  the  Exile,  had  it  been  intro- 
duced by  the  author  of  Lev.  xxv.  just  before  Ezekiel,  no  such  assump- 
tion could  have  been  made.  It  would,  therefore,  seem  necessary  to 
suppose  that  the  ordinance  for  a  jubilee  j^ear  must  have  existed  in  pre- 
exilic  time  ;  for,  strange  as  Deuteronomy's  silence  in  regard  to  it  is,  the 
argumenhtm  e  silentio  cannot  weigh  against  indications  of  a  positive  kind, 
were  they  even  fainter  than  those  we  have  in  regard  to  this  matter. 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS   OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE      361 

to  hear  the  expression  of  a  feeb'ng  that  commerce,  with 
its  necessary  wanderings,  its  temptations  to  dishonesty, 
its  constant  contact  with  heathen  peoples,  was  an  occupa- 
tion that  was  unworthy  of  a  son  of  Israel.  Even  Solomon's 
success  as  a  royal  merchant  would  not  seem  to  have  over- 
come this  feeling,  nor  did  the  later  commercial  successes 
of  kings  like  Jehoshaphat.  In  fact  the  ordinary  Israelite 
had  the  home-staying  farmer's  contempt  and  suspicion  of 
these  far-wandering  commercial  people,  so  much  more 
nimble-witted  than  himself,  who  were  therefore  to  be 
regarded  with  half-admiring  wariness. 

But  the  very  sinews  of  extensive  commerce  were  cut  by 
the  law  against  the  taking  of  interest  from  a  brother 
Israelite.^  Without  credit,  or  the  lending  of  money, 
or  what  is  called  sleeping  partnership  (and  all  these  are 
bound  up  with  receiving  interest),  it  is  impossible  to  have 
extensive  trade.  Without  them  every  merchant  would 
have  to  limit  his  operations  to  cash  transactions  and  to 
his  own  immediate  capital,  and  the  great  combinations 
which  especially  bring  wealth  would  be  impossible.  Now 
we  do  not  need  at  present  to  discuss  the  wisdom  of  pro- 
hibiting the  taking  of  interest,  nor  the  still  more  debated 
question  whether  that  ancient  prohibition  would  be  wise 
or  advantageous  now.  It  is  enough  for  our  purpose  that 
usury  in  its  literal  sense  was  actually  forbidden  among 
Israelites,  and  that  they  were  thus  shut  out  from  the 
developed  commercial  life  of  the  surrounding  nations. 
As  a  result  trade  remained  in  a  merely  embryonic 
condition. 

But  in  still  other  ways  the  .Sinaitic  legislation  inter- 
fered with  its  development.  The  inculcation  of  ceremonial 
purity,  especially  in  food,  and  the  effort  to  make  Israel  a 
peculiar  people  unto  Yahweh,   which  distinguishes  even 

'  Cf.   Kiibcl,  Die  sociale   unci  wirthschaflliche    Geseisgebiing  des   Alten 
Testaments  p,  47. 


362  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  earlier  forms  of  the  law,  made  intercourse  with 
foreigners  and  living  abroad,  always  difficult,  and  under 
some  circumstances  impossible.  Consequently  all  the 
legislation  that  can  possibly  be  considered  commercial 
was  of  a  very  rudimentary  character.  From  every  point 
of  view  it  is  clear  that  ancient  Israel  was  not  a  com- 
mercial people,  and  that  the  Divine  law  was  intended 
to  restrain  them  from  commercial  pursuits.  They  could 
not  have  been  the  holy  and  peculiar  people  they  were 
meant  to  be,  had  they  become  a  nation  of  traffickers. 

With  regard  to  manufacturing  industries  the  case  was  not 
essentially  different.  Such  pursuits  were,  it  is  true,  more 
honoured  than  commerce  was,  for  skill  in  all  arts,  whether 
agricultural  or  industrial,  was  regarded  as  a  special  gift 
of  the  Almighty.  But  so  far  as  the  records  go,  there  is 
no  evidence  that  a  manufacturing  industry  existed,  beyond 
what  the  very  limited  needs  of  the  nation  itself  demanded. 
From  the  fact  that,  according  to  Prov.  xxxi.  24,  which 
was  probably  written  late  in  the  history  of  Israel,  the 
manufacturing  of  linen  garments  for  sale  and  of  girdles 
for  the  Canaanites  was  the  business  of  the  thrifty  and 
virtuous  housewife,  we  may  gather  that  systematic  whole- 
sale manufacture  of  such  things  was  unknown.  Probably 
the  case  was  not  otherwise  in  regard  to  all  branches  of 
industry.  There  are  no  traces  of  trade  castes,  nor  of 
manufacturing  towns;  so  that  the  manufacturing  indus- 
tries, so  far  as  they  existed,  had  no  other  place  than  that 
of  handmaids  to  agriculture,  by  which  the  nation  really 
lived. 

According  to  the  Old  Testament,  then,  the  ideal  state 
of  things  for  a  people  like  Israel  was  that  every  household 
should  be  settled  upon  the  land,  that  permanent  eviction 
from  or  even  alienation  of  the  holdings  should  be  im- 
possible, and  that  the  whole  population  should  have  a 
common   interest    in   agriculture,    that    most   honourable 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS   OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE     363 

and  fundamental  of  all  human  pursuits.  There  were, 
of  course,  some  men  in  Israel  more  prominent  than 
others,  and  some  richer,  but  there  was  to  be  no  impass- 
able barrier  between  classes  such  as  we  find  in  Eastern 
countries  where  caste  prevails,  or  in  Western  countries 
where  the  aristocratic  principle  has  drawn  a  deep  dividing- 
line  between  those  of  "  good  "  blood  and  all  others.  So 
far  as  is  known,  there  were  no  class  barriers  to  inter- 
marriage. From  the  highest  to  the  lowest,  all  were  servants 
of  Yahweh,  and  were  consequently  equal.  The  conditions 
of  the  land  tenure  were  such  that  it  was  impossible,  if  they 
were  respected,  that  large  estates  should  accumulate  in  the 
hands  of  individuals,  and  a  landless  proletariate  could  not 
arise.  The  very  rich  and  the  very  poor  were  alike  legis- 
lated out  of  existence,  and  a  sufficient  provision  for  all  was 
that  which  was  aimed  at.  By  the  cycle  of  Sabbatic  periods 
(the  weekly  Sabbath,  the  Sabbatic  year,  and  the  year 
of  jubilee)  ample  rest  for  the  land  and  its  inhabitants 
was  secured  ;  and  in  the  limits  set  upon  the  period  for 
which  a  Hebrew  slave  might  be  retained,  in  the  release, 
whatever  that  was,  which  the  seventh  year  brought  to  the 
debtor,  and  in  the  restoration  of  land  to  the  impoverished 
owner  in  the  year  of  jubilee,  such  a  series  of  breakwaters 
were  erected  against  the  inrushing  flood  of  pauperism, 
that,  had  they  been  maintained,  the  world  would  have 
seen  for  the  first  time  a  fairly  civilised  community  in 
which  even  moderate  ill-desert  in  a  man  could  not  bring 
irretrievable  ruin  upon  his  posterity.  The  prodigal  was 
hindered  from  selling  his  heritage ;  he  could  only  sell  the 
use  of  it  for  a  number  of  years.  He  could  not  ruin 
himself  by  borrowing  at  extravagant  rates  of  interest, 
for  no  one  was  tempted  to  lend  him,  and  usury  was 
forbidden.  He  might  indeed  run  into  debt  and  be  sold 
into  slavery  along  with  his  family,  but  that  could  only 
be    for   a   few   years,    and   then   they  all   resumed    thejr 


364  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

former  position.  In  this  very  land  where  the  fact, 
Divinely  impressed  upon  human  life,  that  the  sins  of 
the  fathers  were  visited  on  the  children  was  most 
unflinchingly  taught,  the  most  elaborate  precautions  were 
taken  to  mitigate  the  severity  of  this  necessary  law. 
From  the  first  the  ideal  was  that  there  should  be  no 
son  or  daughter  of  Israel  oppressed  or  impoverished 
permanently ;  and  whatever  the  stages  of  advance  in 
Israelite  law  may  have  been,  and  whatever  the  date 
of  particular  ordinances  may  be,  there  is  an  admirable 
consistency  of  aim  throughout.  Even  should  it  be  proved 
that  the  Sabbatic  ordinances  remained  mere  generous 
aspirations,  which  never  entered  into  the  practical  life 
of  the  people  at  all,  that  fact  would  only  emphasise 
the  earnestness  and  persistency  with  which  the  inspired 
legislators  pursued  their  generous  aim.  No  change  in 
circumstances  turned  them  aside.  The  glitter  of  the 
wealth  acquired  by  Solomon  and  other  kings  by  com- 
merce never  seduced  them.  No  ideal  but  that  early 
one  of  every  man  sitting  under  his  own  vine  and  his 
own  fig-tree,  with  none  to  make  him  afraid,  which  is 
witnessed  to  before  the  Exile  (Micah  iv.  4),  in  the  Exile 
(i  Kings  iv.  25),  and  after  the  Exile  (Zech.  iii.  10), 
was  ever  cherished  by  them ;  and  the  whole  economic 
legislation  is  entirely  consistent  with  what  we  know  of 
the  earliest  time.  And  the  deepest  roots  of  it  all  were 
religious.  The  Biblical  writers  have  no  doubt  at  all 
that  the  ideal  economic  state  can  be  reached  only  by  a 
people  attuned  by  religion  to  self-sacrifice,  to  pity,  and  to 
justice.  In  this  they  differ  radically  from  the  socialists 
or  semi-socialists  of  to-day.  These  imagine  that  man 
needs  only  a  favourable  environment  to  become  good ; 
whereas  the  Scriptural  writers  know  that  to  use  well 
the  best  environment  is  a  task  v/hich,  more  than  anything, 
puts  strain  upon  the  moral  and  spiritual  nature.     For  to 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS   OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE     365 


deal  in  a  supremely  wise  fashion  with  great  opportunities 
is  the  part  only  of  a  nature  perfectly  moralised.  Con- 
sequently all  the  social  laws  of  Israel  are  made  to  have 
their  root  in  the  relation  of  the  people  to  their  God. 

There  was  only  one  power  that  could  secure  that  this 
admirable  machinery  would  move,  and  keep  it  moving. 
That  was  the  love  and  fear  of  God.  The  conduct 
prescribed  was  the  conduct  befitting  the  true  Israelite,  the 
man  who  was  faithful  in  all  his  ways.  The  laws  marked 
out  the  paths  wherein  he  should  walk  if  he  willed  to  do 
God's  will.  They  were,  therefore,  ideal  in  all  their 
highest  prescriptions,  and  could  never  become  real  except 
where  the  true  religion  had  had  its  perfect  work.  In  that 
respect  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  resembles  the  Israelite 
law.  It  presupposes  a  completely  Christian  society, 
just  as  the  old  law  presupposes  a  completely  Yahwistic 
society,  i.e.  a  society  made  up  of  men  who  made  devotion 
to  their  God  the  chief  motive  of  their  lives.  In  such  a 
community  there  would  have  been  no  difficulty  in  entirely 
realising  the  state  of  things  aimed  at  here,  just  as  in  a 
community  penetrated  by  the  love  of  Christ  the  Serm^on 
on  the  Mount  would  be  not  only  practicable  but  natural. 
But  without  that  supreme  motive  much  that  the  enact- 
ments of  both  the  Old  Testament  and  the  New  demand 
must  remain  mere  aspiration.  Just  in  proportion  as 
Israel  was  true  to  Yahweh  was  the  law  realised,  and 
the  demands  of  the  law  always  acted  as  a  spur  to  the 
better  part  of  the  people  to  enter  into  fuller  sympathy 
and  communion  with  Him  in  order  that  they  might 
respond  to  them.  The  law  and  the  religion  of  the  people 
acted  and  reacted  upon  one  another,  but  the  greater  of 
these  two  elements  was  religion. 

It  was  not  wonderful,  therefore,  that  to  a  large  extent 
this  legislation  failed,  as  men  measure  failure.  The  re- 
ligious state  of  the  nation  never  was  what  it  should  have 


366  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

been ;  and  the  law,  though  it  was  held  to  be  Divine,  was 
never  wholly  observed.  In  the  Northern  Kingdom,  by  the 
time  of  the  Syrian  wars,  the  old  constitution  of  Israel 
had  broken  up.  The  hardy  yeomanry  had  been  ruined 
and  dispersed.  Their  lands  had  been  seized  or  bought 
by  the  rich,  and  every  law  that  had  been  made  to  ensure 
restoration  was  habitually  disregarded.  As  Robertson 
Smith  states  it,^ :  ^'  The  unhappy  Syrian  wars  sapped 
the  strength  of  the  country,  and  gradually  destroyed  the 
old  peasant  proprietors  who  were  the  best  hope  of  the 
nation.  The  gap  between  the  many  poor  and  the  few 
rich  became  wider  and  wider.  The  landless  classes  were 
ground  down  by  usury  and  oppression,  for  in  that  state 
of  society  the  landless  man  had  no  career  in  trade,  and 
was  at  the  mercy  of  the  landholding  capitalist."  And  in 
Judah  the  state  of  things,  though  not  so  bad,  was  similar. 
In  the  days  of  Zedekiah  we  know  that  Hebrew  slaves 
were  held  for  life,  instead  of  being  released  in  the  seventh 
year.^  The  properties  of  those  compelled  to  sell  were 
never  returned  to  the  owners,  and  all  the  laws  that  were 
meant  to  secure  the  welfare  and  prosperity  of  the  masses 
of  Israel  were  contemptuously  disregarded*  In  short, 
the  worst  features  of  a  purely  competitive  civilisation, 
with  materialism  eating  into  its  soul,  became  glaringly 
manifest.  All  the  canonical  prophets  without  exception 
denounce  the  vices  and  tyrannies  of  the  rich.^  As  far  as 
can  be  learned,  moreover,  the  year  of  release  and  the 
Sabbatic  year  were  not  regularly  or  generally  observed, 
while  the  jubilee  year  would  seem  never  to  have  been 
kept  after  the  Exile.  The  laws  regarding  taking  interest 
were  also  evaded.* 

Nevertheless  it  would  be  a  great  error  to  suppose  that 
these  Divinely  given  social  laws  should  be  branded  as  a 

'  Prophets  of  Israel,  p.  88.  ^  Gf.  Amos  ii.  6ff. 

'^  Cf.  Jer.  xxxiv.  8  fF.  *  Neh.  v.  i  seq. 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS   OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE     367 

failure.  They  were  not  lived  up  to,  and  it  is  not  impro- 
bable that  the  corruption  of  the  people's  life  was  in  a 
degree  intensified  by  the  reaction  from  so  high  an  ideal. 
But  the  axiom  which  is  current  now  in  all  the  newspapers, 
that  laws  too  far  above  the  general  level  of  the  national 
conscience  cannot  be  enforced,  and  becoming  a  dead  letter 
tend  to  produce  lawlessness,  does  not  apply  to  such 
codes  as  those  of  Israel.  These,  as  has  more  than  once 
been  pointed  out,  were  not  of  the  same  character  as  our 
legal  codes  are.  Among  us,  laws  are  meant  to  be  observed 
with  minute  and  careful  diligence,  and  any  breach  of  them 
is  punished  by  the  courts,  which,  on  the  whole,  can  be 
easily  set  in  motion.  Ancient  religious  codes  are  never 
of  that  kind.  They  do  contain  laws  of  that  character,  but 
the  bulk  of  the  provisions  are  not  laws  which  the  execu- 
tive is  to  enforce,  but  ideals  of  conduct  which  the  true 
worshipper  of  God  ought  to  strive  to  attain  to.  It  is, 
therefore,  of  their  very  essence  that  they  should  be  far 
above  the  average  national  conscience.  Nations  whose 
ideals  soar  no  higher  than  the  possible  attainment  of 
the  average  man  as  he  is,  have  virtually  no  ideals  at 
all,  and  are  cut  off  from  all  enduring  upward  impulses. 
Those,  on  the  contrary,  who  have  a  vision  of  the  perfect 
life,  are  certain  to  be  both  humbler,  and  at  the  same  time 
more  sure  to  persist  in  the  painful  path  of  moral  discipline. 
As  "a  man's  reach  should  exceed  his  grasp,"  so  also 
should  a  nation's  ;  and  though  it  is  almost  always  for- 
gotten, it  is  precisely  Israel's  glory  that  she  set  up  for 
herself  and  exhibited  to  the  world  an  ideal  of  brotherhood, 
of  love  to  God  and  man,  to  which  she  could  not  attain. 
Great  as  the  practical  failure  in  Israel  was,  therefore,  no 
fault  can  be  found  in  the  legislation.  It  moulded  the 
characters  of  men  who  were  sensitive  to  the  influences 
coming  from  God,  so  that  they  became  fit  instruments  of 
inspiration  ;  and  it  made  their  lives  examples  of  the  highest 


368  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

virtue  that  the  ancient  world  knew.  Further,  it  gave 
shape  to  the  hopes  and  aspirations  of  the  people,  especially 
where  it  was  not  realised.  The  year  of  jubilee,  for 
example,  is  the  groundwork  of  that  great  and  affecting 
promise  contained  in  Isa.  Ixi :  "  The  Spirit  of  the  Lord 
Yahweh  is  upon  me,  because  Yahweh  hath  anointed  me 
to  preach  good  tidings  unto  the  meek  ;  He  hath  sent  me 
to  bind  up  the  broken-hearted,  to  proclaim  liberty  (deror) 
to  the  captives,  and  the  opening  of  the  prison  to  them 
that  are  bound;  to  proclaim  the  acceptable  year  of 
Yahweh  and  the  day  of  vengeance  of  our  God ;  to  com- 
fort all  that  mourn."  That  which  was  unattainable  here, 
amid  the  greeds  and  lusts  of  an  unspiritual  generation, 
gave  colour  to  the  Messianic  future ;  and  men  were  taught 
to  look  and  wait  for  a  kingdom  of  God  in  which  a  peace 
and  truth  that  could  not  as  3'et  be  reached  would  be  the 
certain  possession  of  all. 

When  we  turn  to  modern  times  and  modern  circum- 
stances, it  is  not  easy  to  see  how  this  ancient  law  can 
be  applicable  to  them.  In  the  first  place,  much  of  it 
was  made  binding  upon  Israel  only  because  of  its  peculiar 
character  as  the  people  to  whom  the  true  religion  was 
revealed.  As  custodians  of  that,  they  were  justified  in 
keeping  up  walls  of  partition  between  themselves  and 
the  world,  which  if  universally  accepted  would  only  be 
hurtful  to  the  highest  interests  of  mankind.  On  the  con- 
trary, the  development  of  the  true  religion  having  been 
completed  by  the  coming  of  Christ,  it  is  the  duty  of  those 
nations  w^hich  enjoy  the  light  to  spread  abroad  the  **  good 
news  "  of  God  which  they  have  received,  and  to  exhibit  its 
power  among  all  the  nations  of  the  earth.  The  highest 
and  most  Divine  call  which  can  now  come  to  any  people 
must,  therefore,  be  radically  different  in  some  chief  aspects 
from  that  of  Israel.  In  the  second  place,  the  civilisation 
and  culture  of  the  great  nations  of  to-day  are  far  more 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS   OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE      369 


complicated  than  any  ancient  civilisation  ever  was,  and 
the  general  level  is  fixed  by  an  action  and  reaction 
extending  over  the  whole  civilised  world.  No  successes 
can  be  achieved,  no  blunders  can  be  committed,  in  any 
part  of  the  world  which  do  not  affect  almost  immediately 
the  farthest  ends  of  the  earth.  Moreover  the  intimate 
and  universal  correlation  of  interest  makes  interference 
with  any  part  of  the  complicated  whole  an  exceedingly 
perilous  matter. .  Any  proposal  that  this  law,  as  being 
Divinely  given,  ought  in  its  economic  aspect  to  be  made 
universally  binding,  should  therefore  be  met  by  a  demand 
for  a  careful  inquiry  into  possible  differences  between 
ancient  life  and  modern,  which  might  make  guidance 
Divinely  given  to  the  one  inapplicable  to  the  other.  It 
is  not  necessarily  true  that  because  Israel  by  Divine 
command  established  every  household  upon  the  soil, 
forbade  interest,  and  did  nothing  to  encourage  trade  and 
manufactures,  we  should  do  these  things.  Take,  for 
instance,  the  case  of  interest.  In  our  day,  and  in  civili- 
sations of  a  high  type,  lending  money  to  a  person  not  in 
distress  at  all,  but  who  sees  an  opportunity  of  making 
enough  by  the  use  of  borrowed  money  to  pay  the  interest 
and  make  a  profit,  is  often  a  most  praiseworthy  and 
charitable  act. 

But  if  the  Israelite  legislation  in  regard  to  interest 
cannot  justly  be  taken  as  a  law  for  all  time,  still  less  can 
any  great  modern  state  neglect  or  discourage  commerce 
and  manufactures.  The  merely  embryonic  character  of 
commercial  legislation,  and  the  contempt  for  the  merchant 
which  did  in  ancient  days  exist,  would  be  exceedingly  out 
of  place  now.  There  is  no  career  more  honourable  than 
that  of  the  merchant  of  our  day  when  he  carries  on  his 
business  in  a  high-minded  fashion,  nor  is  there  any  member 
of  the  community  whose  calHng  is  more  beneficent  than 
his.     So  long  as  he  looks  for  gain  to  himself  in  ways  which, 

24 


370  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

taken  on  the  great  scale,  bring  benefit  both  to  producer 
and  consumer,  his  activity  is  purely  beneficial.  There  is 
absolutely  no  reason  why  commercial  life  should  not  be  as 
honest,  as  sound,  as  much  in  accord  with  the  mind  of  God, 
in  itself,  as  any  other  manner  of  life.  For  in  many  ways 
it  has  been  a  civilising  agent  of  the  highest  power.  Of 
course,  if  the  charges  brought  against  merchants  by  Ruskin, 
for  example,  v/ho  seizes  upon  and  believes  every  story 
which  involves  charges  of  fraud  against  modern  commerce, 
were  true  ;  if  it  were  impossible,  as  he  says  it  is,  for  an 
honest  man  to  prosper  in  trade,  then  we  might  have  some 
ground  for  condemning  this  branch  of  human  activity.  But 
happily  only  a  confirmed  and  incorrigible  pessimist  can 
believe  that.  In  our  time  some  of  the  noblest  men  of 
whom  we  have  any  knowledge  have  been  merchants,  and 
among  no  class  has  so  much  princely  generosity  been  ex- 
hibited. If  mercantile  help  had  been  withdrawn  from  the 
poor,  if  the  time,  the  money,  the  organising  skill  which  mer- 
chants have  freely  expended  upon  charities  were  suddenly 
to  fail  them,  the  case  against  our  modern  civilisation  would 
be  indefinitely  stronger  than  it  is.  Moreover  the  immense 
expansion  of  credit  which  is  at  once  the  glory  and  the 
danger  of  modern  commerce,  is  itself  a  proof  that  such 
wholesale  condemnation  as  we  have  spoken  of  is 
unwarrantable.  The  bulk  of  commerce  must,  after  all, 
be  fairly  sound,  otherwise  it  could  not  continue  and 
spread  as  it  does.  And,  as  against  the  evils  which 
affect  it  in  common  with  all  human  activities,  we  must 
put  the  fact  that  it  brings  the  produce  of  all  lands  to 
the  door  even  of  the  poor,  and  by  the  constant  contact 
between  nations  which  it  causes  it  is  influencing  the 
thought  as  well  as  the  lives  of  men.  Human  brotherhood 
is  being  furthered  by  it,  slowly,  it  is  true,  but  surely,  and 
the  barriers  which  separate  the  nations  are  being  sapped 
by  its  influence.     These  are  indispensable  services  for  the 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS   OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE      371 


future  progress  of  mankind,  and  make  commerce  now  as 
much  the  necessary  handmaid  of  the  highest  life  as  it 
would  have  been  a  hindrance  to  it  in  the  case  of  the  chosen 
people,  before  they  had  assimilated  the  truths  of  which 
they  were  to  be  the  bearers  to  the  world.  That  commerce, 
and  trade  in  general,  need  to  be  purified  goes  without 
saying.  That  it  may,  of  late  years,  have  deteriorated,  as 
the  general  decay  of  faith  and  the  pursuit  of  luxury  have 
weakened  the  sanctions  of  morality,  is  not  improbable. 
But  in  itself  it  is  not  only  a  legitimate  human  activity ;  it 
is  also  an  admirable  instrument  for  bringing  home  to  the 
consciences  of  men  the  truth  that  they  are  all  their 
brothers'  keepers.  It  presses  home  as  nothing  else  could 
do  the  great  truth  proclaimed  by  St.  Paul  in  regard  to 
the  Church,  as  true  also  of  the  world,  that  if  one  member 
suffers  all  the  body  suffers  with  it.  Every  day  through 
this  channel  men  are  receiving  lessons,  which  they  cannot 
choose  but  hear,  to  the  effect  that  no  permanent  benefit 
can  come  from  the  loss  and  suffering  of  men  in  any  part 
of  the  world ;  that  peace  and  righteousness  and  good  faith 
are  things  which  have  supreme  value  even  in  the  mercan- 
tile sense  ;  and  that,  conversely,  the  merchant's  pursuit  of 
wealth,  if  carried  on  in  accord  with  the  fundamental  truths 
of  morality,  inevitably  becomes  a  potent  factor  in  that 
advance  to  a  worldwide  knowledge  of  the  Lord,  which 
gleamed  before  the  eyes  of  prophets  and  seers  as  the 

"  Far-off  Divine  event, 
To  which  the  whole  creation  moves." 

But  if  we  cannot  make  the  Old  Testament  our  law  in 
regard  to  commerce,  we  must  ask  whether  the  legislation 
in  regard  to  land  has  for  us  any  binding  force  ?  Viewing 
it  with  this  question  in  our  minds,  I  think  we  must  be 
struck  by  one  fact,  this  namely,  that  the  universal 
possession  of  land  which  was  provided  for  in  Israel  and 


372  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

so  anxiously  maintained  is  the  only  provision  known 
against  the  growth  of  a  wage-earning  class  largely,  if  not 
entirely,  at  the  mercy  of  the  employer.  In  Greece  and 
Rome  the  population  at  first  were  all  settled  on  their  own 
lands,  and  it  was  only  when  by  money-lending  the  small 
properties  were  bought  up  and  turned  into  huge  farms, 
worked  by  farm-bailiffs  and  slaves,  that  misery  began  to 
invade  all  parts  of  the  social  fabric.  In  mediaeval  and 
feudal  England,  on  the  other  hand,  and  indeed  wherever 
the  feudal  system  existed,  the  cultivators,  even  when 
they  were  serfs,  had  an  inalienable  right  to  the  land. 
They  could  not  be  evicted  if  they  rendered  certain 
not  very  burdensome  services  to  the  lord.  "  As  long  as 
these  dues  were  satisfied,  it  is  plain  the  tenant  was  secure 
from  dispossession,"  says  Professor  Thorold  Rogers  (Six 
Centuries,  etc.,  p.  44).  But  in  time  that  system  was  broken 
down ;  and  ever  since,  until  within  the  last  half-century, 
the  course  of  things  with  the  labouring  classes  in  England 
has  been  one  long  descent.  So  long  as  the  people  were 
attached  to  the  soil,  and  so  long  as  all  alike  practised 
agriculture,  as  in  Palestine  under  the  Mosaic  law. 
Englishmen  lived  in  rough  plenty,  and  were  for  the  most 
part  content.  The  fifteenth  century  was  the  golden  age 
of  mediaeval  agriculture ;  but  a  change  for  the  worse 
came  in  with  the  seventeenth,  and  it  continued.^ 

Two  measures — the  introduction  of  competitive  rents 
with  its  corollary,  eviction,  and  the  enclosure  of  the 
common  lands — worked  gradually  on  until  they  have 
entirely  divorced  the  workman  from  the  soil,  and 
Professor  Cairnes^  has  told  us  clearly  what  that  means. 
"In  a  contest  between  vast  bodies  of  people  so  circum- 
stanced and  the  owners  of  the  soil  the  negotiation  could 
have  but  one  issue,  that  of  transferring  to  the  owners  of 

'  Contemp.  Rev.,  1880,  April,  p.  681. 
^  Essays  on  Political  Economy,  p.  201. 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS   OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE      373 


the  soil  the  whole  produce,  minus  what  was  sufficient  to 
maintain  in  the  lowest  state  of  existence  the  race  of 
cultivators.  This  is  what  has  happened  wherever  the 
owners  of  the  soil,  discarding  all  considerations  but  those 
dictated  by  self-interest,  have  really  availed  themselves  of 
the  full  strength  of  their  position.  It  is  what  has  hap- 
pened under  rapacious  governments  in  Asia;  it  is  what 
has  happened  under  rapacious  landlords  in  Ireland ;  it  is 
what  now  happens  under  the  bourgeois  proprietors  of 
Flanders ;  it  is,  in  short,  the  inevitable  result  which  cannot 
but  happen  in  the  great  majority  of  all  societies  now 
existing  on  earth  where  land  is  given  up  to  be  dealt  with 
on  commercial  principles  unqualified  by  pubhc  opinion, 
custom,  or  law."  The  result  is  that  the  labourers  have 
only  their  daily  wages  to  depend  upon.  '*  They  have  no 
means  of  productive  home  industry ;  they  have  not  even 
a  home  from  which  they  cannot  be  ejected  at  any  moment 
on  failure  to  pay  the  weekly  rent;  they  have  no  land, 
garden,  or  domestic  animals,  the  produce  of  which  might 
support  them  till  fresh  work  could  be  obtained."^  We 
need  not  wonder  that  this  question  of  the  occupancy  of 
land  as  the  only  visible  remedy  for  the  hideous  social 
state  of  the  most  highly  civihsed  nations  of  the  world  is 
gradually  becoming  the  question  of  our  time.  A  great 
reaction  against  the  purely  commercial  theory  of  land 
tenure  has  taken  place.  The  land  legislation  in  Ireland 
has  been  based  on  the  doctrines  that  the  nation  cannot 
permit  absolute  property  in  land,  and  that  there  is  no 
hope  for  any  permanent  improvement  in  the  condition  of 
the  poor  until  labourers  have  land  of  their  own.  Now 
these  are  precisely  the  principles  of  the  Scriptural  land 
legislation.  Under  it  landlords  with  absolute  rights  over 
land  were  impossible,  and  the  rise  of  a  proletariate  at  the 


'  Wallace,  Land  Nalionalisation^  p.  16. 


374  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

mercy  of  the  capitalist  was  also  impossible.  It  is  not  so 
strange,  therefore,  as  it  might  at  first  sight  appear  that  the 
demands  of  advanced  land  reformers,  as  they  are  voiced 
in  Mr.  Wallace's  book  (p.  192),  are,  mutatis  mutandis^ 
identical  with  the  provisions  of  the  Israelite  law.  He 
demands  (i)  that  landlordism  shall  be  superseded  by 
occupying  ownership ;  (2)  that  the  tenure  of  the  holders 
of  land  must  be  made  secure  and  permanent;  (3)  that 
arrangements  must  be  made  by  which  every  British 
subject  may  secure  a  portion  of  land  for  personal  occupa- 
tion at  its  fair  agricultural  value  ;  and  (4)  that  in  order  that 
these  conditions  be  rendered  permanent  sub-letting  must 
be  absolutely  prohibited,  and  mortgages  strictly  limited. 
This  essential  oneness  of  view  in  the  modern  land  re- 
former and  in  the  ancient  law  is  all  the  more  remarkable 
that,  so  far  as  can  be  gathered  from  his  book,  Mr.  Wallace 
has  never  regarded  the  Old  Testament  from  this  point 
of  view.  He  never  quotes  it,  and  is  apparently  quite 
unconscious  that  the  plan  which  experience  of  present 
evils,  and  acute  and  disinterested  reflection  on  them,  has 
suggested  to  him,  was  set  forth  thousands  of  years  ago  as 
the  only  righteous  one. 

But  this  is  not  by  any  means  the  end  of  the  matter. 
Even  if  the  social  reformers  of  our  day  could  restore 
society  to  the  conditions  set  forth  so  emphatically  and 
so  long  ago  in  Israel,  history  proves  that  nothing  more 
than  a  temporary  improvement  might  be  accomplished. 
In  Israel,  as  we  have  seen,  with  the  decay  of  religion 
came  the  decay  of  this  righteous  social  state.  Human 
selfishness  then  shook  off  the  curb  of  religion,  and  gave 
itself  without  restraint  to  the  oppression  of  the  poor. 
Have  we  any  reason  to  believe  that  now  human  selfish- 
ness would  do  less  ?  There  appears  little  ground  to 
think  so;  and  though  we  may  believe  that  without  the 
acceptance    of    Deuteronomic   principles   in   modern   life 


THE  ECONOMIC  ASPECTS  OF  ISRAELITE  LIFE      375 

we    cannot   restrain    the   growth    of  poverty,   even    with 
Deuteronomic    principles  embodied    in    our  laws  nothing 
will  be  done  if  the  people  turn  their  backs  upon  religion, 
make    selfish    enjoyment    their    highest    good,    and    the 
comforts    and    pleasures   of  a   merely   material  life  their 
only   heart-warming   aspiration.     In    that   fact   we    have 
an  indication  of  the  true  functions  of  the  Church  and  of 
religious  teachers  in  the  social    and  political   life  of  our 
time  and  of  times  to  come.     As  individuals,  religious  men 
should  certainly  be  found  always  among  the  advocates  of 
all    laws    and    plans    which    tend    to  justice    and  mercy, 
and  to  the  raising  of  the  toilers  everywhere  to  a  higher 
standard  of  living.     Further,  at  no  time  should  the  Church 
be  found  committed  to    a  purely  conservative    policy,   of 
retaining  things  as  they  are.     The  undeniable  facts  as  to 
the  condition  of  the  poor  are  so  utterly  unjustifiable,  that 
to    leave    things  as  they  are  is    to  fall  into    the    treason 
of   despair   in    regard    to    the   future    of   our    race,    and 
into    scarcely   veiled  disbelief  of  the   essential    truth    of 
Christianity.      No    Church   whose    heart    has    not    been 
corrupted  by  worldliness  can  think  for  a  moment  that  the 
present  state  of  things  in  all  highly  civilised  communities 
is  even  tolerable.     It  cannot  last,  and  it  ought  not  to  last ; 
the    Church  that    timidly  supports    it,  lest    worst    things 
should  come,  is  named  and  known  thereby  for  recreant 
to  Christ  and  to  the  highest  hopes  of  His  Gospel.     But, 
on  the  other  hand,  it  is  only  in  very  exceptional  circum- 
stances, and  for  short  intervals,  that  the  Churches  and  their 
ministers  can  ever  be  called  upon  to  make  the  external, 
material  condition  of  the  people  their  first  and  chief  care. 
They  have  a  place  of  their  own  to  fill,  a  function  of  their 
own  to  discharge ;  and  upon  their  efficiency  and  diligence 
in  these  the  stability  and  permanence  of  all  that  politicians 
and  publicists  can  accomplish  ultimately  depends.     They 
must  keep  alive  and  nourish  the  religious  life,  as  that  life 


376  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

has  been  shaped  and  constituted  by  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ.  Their  province  is  to  witness,  in  season  and  out 
of  season,  for  a  Hfe  of  purity  and  love,  for  the  Divine  and 
ideal  sides  of  things,  for  the  necessity,  for  man's  highest 
well-being,  of  a  life  hid  with  Christ  in  God.  If  they  do 
not  keep  up  this  testimony,  no  others  will ;  and  if  it  be 
dropped  out  of  sight,  then  the  social  agony  and  struggle, 
the  patriotic  and  humanitarian  strivings  of  all  the  re- 
formers, will  lack  their  final  sanction.  Men  will  inevitably 
come  to  think  that  man's  life  does  consist  in  the  abundance 
of  the  things  that  he  possesses,  the  leisure,  the  amusement, 
the  culture  which  by  combining  material  resources  he 
may  attain  to.  But  it  is  to  deny  and  denounce  that  view 
that  the  Church  exists  in  the  world.  It  was  to  lift  men 
out  of  it,  to  set  them  above  it  for  ever,  that  Christ  died. 
It  is  finally  only  by  abandoning  it  that  the  highest  social 
condition  can  be  reached  and  made  permanent  for  the 
multitudes  of  men.  In  no  way  therefore  can  the  Church 
so  dangerously  betray  the  cause  of  the  poor  and  the 
oppressed  as  by  plunging  into  the  heat  of  the  social  and 
political  struggle.  She  has  to  witness  to  higher  things 
than  that  involves,  and  her  silence  in  the  ideal  region 
which  would  certainly  follow  her  devotion  to  material 
interests,  however  unselfish,  would  be  but  ill  compensated 
for  by  any  imaginable  success  she  might  attain. 


CHAPTER   XXI 

JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL 

AMONG  the  nations  of  the  modern  world  one  of  the 
most  vital  distinctions  is  the  degree  in  which  just 
judgment  is  estimated  and  provided  for.  Indeed,  accord- 
ing to  modern  ideas,  life  is  tolerable  only  where  all  men 
are  equal  before  the  law  ;  where  all  are  judged  by  statutes 
which  are  known,  or  at  least  may  be  known,  by  all ; 
where  corruption  or  animus  in  a  judge  is  as  rare  as  it 
is  held  to  be  dishonourable.  But  we  cannot  forget  that 
in  the  majority  of  even  the  more  advanced  countries 
of  the  world  these  three  conditions  are  not  yet  found, 
and  that  where  they  do  exist  they  are  only  recent  acquire- 
ments. In  the  latest  born,  and  in  many  respects  the  most 
advanced  of  the  great  commonwealths,  in  the  United 
States  of  America,  the  corruption  of  a  number  of  the 
inferior  courts  is  undeniable,  and  is  tolerated  with  a  most 
disappointing  patience  by  the  people.  In  England  Judge 
Jeffries  is  no  very  remote  memory,  and  Lord  Bacon's 
acceptance  of  presents  from  litigants  in  his  court  has  only 
been  made  more  certain  by  recent  investigations.  An 
absolutely  honest  intention  to  give  even-handed  justice 
to  all  is,  therefore,  even  in  England,  only  a  recent  attain- 
ment, and  in  no  country  is  the  honest  intention  always 
successful  in  realising  itself.  But  if  this  be  so  among  the 
civilised  nations  of  the  West,  we  may  say  that  in  Oriental 
countries  there  has  been  little  of  systematic  and  continuous 
effort  to  give  even-handed  justice  at   all.     Yet  nowhere 

377 


378  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


has  the  sinfulness  and  the  destructiveness  of  corruption  in 
judgment  been  more  impassionedly  and  more  frequently 
set  forth  by  the  highest  authorities  in  religion  and  morals, 
than  in  the  East.  Tupper,  our  most  recent  authority, 
in  writing  of  Cktr  Indian  Protectorate^  p.  289,  describes 
the  Indian  attitude  to  law  thus  :  "  There  was  not  that 
reverence  for  law  which  in  Europe  is  in  all  probability 
very  largely  due  to  the  influence  of  the  Roman  law,  and 
to  the  teaching  of  the  Roman  Catholic  and  other  Christian 
Churches.  So  far  as  there  was  a  germ  out  of  which  the 
respect  for  law  ought  to  have  grown,  it  was  to  be  found 
in  dislike  to  actions  plainly  opposed  to  custom  and  tradition. 
There  was  a  deeply  rooted  and  widespread  conviction  that 
there  could  be  no  rule  to  which  exceptions  could  not  be 
made,  if  agreeable  to  the  discretion  of  the  chief  or  any  of 
his  delegates.  The  chief  was  set  above  the  law ;  it  did 
not  limit  his  authority  by  any  constitution.  There  was 
no  legislation  for  the  improvement  of  law.  The  adminis- 
tration of  justice  was  extremely  imperfect."  The  same 
writer  describes  the  result  of  such  a  state  of  mind  in  his 
picture  of  Mahratta  rule  (p.  247).  "  There  was,"  he  says, 
'^  no  prescribed  form  of  trial.  Men  were  seized  on  slight 
suspicions.  Presumptions  of  guilt  were  freely  made. 
Torture  was  employed  to  compel  confession.  Prisoners 
for  theft  were  often  whipped  at  intervals  to  make  them 
discover  where  the  stolen  property  was  hidden.  Ordmarily 
no  law  was  referred  to  except  in  cases  affecting  religion." 
That  there  were  both  rlindu  codes  and  Mohammedan  codes 
in  existence  which  claimed  and  were  believed  to  have 
Divine  authority  made  no  difference  in  India.  Nor  does 
it  make  any  in  Persia  to-day.^ 

Now,   in   coming  to  the  consideration  of  the  views  of 
justice  embodied  in  Old  Testament  law,  and  the  quality  of 

'    See  ante,  p.  304. 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  379 

the  judiciary  in  ancient  Israel,  we  must  take  not  Western 
but  Eastern  ideas  as  our  standard.  Judging  from  that  point 
of  view,  it  should  create  no  prejudice  in  our  minds  if  we 
find  on  the  first  glance  that  all  men  were  not  equal  before 
the  ancient  law  of  Israel ;  that  for  a  considerable  period, 
if  not  during  the  whole  political  existence  of  Israel,  there 
was  no  very  extensive  written  law  ;  and  that  arbitrary  and 
corrupt  judgment  was  only  too  common  at  all  times.  For 
none  of  these  defects  would  indicate  in  ancient  Israel  the 
same  evils  as  similar  defects  in  nations  of  our  time  would 
indicate.  They  are  rather  defects  in  the  process  of  being 
overcome,  than  defects  arising  from  feeble  or  vitiated  life. 
If  there  was  a  constant  movement  towards  the  highest 
state  of  things,  that  is  all  we  can  demand  or  expect  to  find. 
Now  there  does  seem  to  have  been  that.  As  has  been 
well  pointed  out  by  Dr.  Oort,^  in  the  tribes  which  became 
Israel  justice  must  have  been  administered  by  the  heads 
of  the  various  bodies  which  went  to  make  these  up.  The 
household  was  ruled  even  in  matters  of  life  and  death 
solely  by  the  father  ;  the  family,  in  the  wider  sense,  was 
judged  by  its  ov/n  heads  ;  the  tribes  by  the  elders  of  the 
tribes,  and  there  probably  was  no  appeal  from  one  tribunal 
to  another.  Each  tribunal  was  final  in  its  own  domain. 
It  may  be,  also,  that  the  judicial  function  was  in  all  these 
bodies  exercised  in  the  lax  and  timid  fashion  common 
among  Bedouin  tribes  to-day.^  In  all  cases,  too,  it  is  pro- 
bable that  in  the  pre-Mosaic  time  the  standard  of  judgment 
was  customary  law.  Only  with  this  very  great  modifica- 
tion can  Oort's  epigrammatic  description  of  the  situation 
— "  There  was  no  law,  but  there  were  givers  of  legal 
decisions  " — be  accepted.  So  far  as  can  be  ascertained,  the 
customs  according  to  which  men  were  expected  to  live 
were  perfectly  well  known,  and  within  certain  narrow  limits 

'  Cf.  Oud-Israel  Rechtswezen,  pp.  lo  ff. 

'  Cf.  Doughty,  Arabia  Deserta,  vol.  i.,  p.  249. 


38o  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

of  variation  were  extraordinarily  stable.  How  stable 
customary  law  may  be  made,  even  in  the  midst  of  a  society 
governed  in  the  main  according  to  written  law  in  its 
strictest  sense,  may  be  seen  in  the  execration  which  any 
breach  of  the  Ulster  custom  of  tenant  right  met  with,  before 
that  custom  was  embodied  in  any  statutes.  And  in 
antiquity  the  stringency  of  custom  can  hardly  be  exagger- 
ated. Under  it,  when  thoroughly  established,  there  was, 
in  all  the  cases  covered  by  it,  only  this  one  way  of  acting 
for  all,  both  men  and  women,  who  were  fit  for  society  at 
all.  Any  alternative  course  was  probably  inconceivable 
in  the  tribal  stage  of  the  Israelites'  existence. 

But  a  change  would  doubtless  be  wrought  whenever  the 
appointment  of  a  king  took  place.  Then  national  law  , 
would  appear,  in  embryo  at  least ;  and  at  first,  until  custom 
had  grown  up  in  this  region  also,  it  would  largely  be  an 
expression  of  the  will  of  the  king,  and  of  the  royal  officers 
instructed  and  trained  by  the  king.  But  it  would  have 
free  and  unchallenged  course  only  when  it  claimed 
authority  in  matters  lying  outside  of  the  family  and  tribal 
jurisdictions.  Wherever  it  attempted  to  interfere  with 
tribal  or  family  rights,  danger  to  the  kingship  of  the  most 
acute  kind  would  be  sure  to  arise.  In  all  probability,  it 
was  disregard  of  this  axiomatic  truth  which  made  Solomon's 
reign  so  burdensome  to  the  people  and  tore  the  kingdom 
asunder  under  Rehoboam.  Ahab  too  fell  a  victim  to  his 
disregard  of  it.  Lastly,  the  introduction  of  elaborate 
written  codes  of  law  would,  if  it  came  as  the  crown  of  such 
a  development,  depose  custom  from  its  supremacy,  though 
it  would  not  abolish  it ;  and  would  substitute  for  it  as  the 
main  element  in  all  judicial  matters  the  written  prescription, 
which  is  the  necessary  presupposition  of  a  fully  organised 
judiciary  of  the  modern  type,  with  a  regulated  and  definite 
power  of  appeal. 

But  in  the  case  of  ancient  Israel  there  is  a  distinguish- 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  381 


ing  element  which    has    to  be  fitted    into    this    ordinary 
scheme  of  progression,  and  that  is  the  Divine  revelation  to 
Moses.     Taken    up   at    the    tribal    stage    by    the    Mosaic 
revelation,  the  Israelite  tribes  v^^ere  touched  and  welded 
into    coherence,    if  not  quite  as  a  nation,  at  least  as  the 
people  of  Yahweh,  so  that  during  all  the  distracting  days 
of  the  Judges  they  kept  up  in  essentials  their  social  and 
religious  unity.^     And  with  the  religious  union  there  must 
have  come  administrative  uniformity  to  some  considerable 
extent.     The  jurisdiction  of  the  heads  of  households,  of 
heads  of  families,  and  of  the  tribal  elders  would  be  as  little 
interfered    with    as    possible;   but,  as  we  have   seen,   all 
customs  and  rights  had  to  be  reviewed  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  new  religion,  and  appeal  to    Moses  as    the 
prophet  of  it  must  have  often  been  unavoidable.     Just  as 
his  first  followers  were  continually  coming  to  Mohammed, 
to  ask  whether  this  or  that  ancient  custom  could  be  followed 
by  professors  of  Islam,  so  there  must  have  been  constant 
appeals  to  Moses.     So  long  as  he  lived,  therefore,  he,  and 
after  him  Joshua  and  Moses'  fellow-tribesmen  the  sons  of 
Levi,  as  being  specially  zealous  for  the  religion  of  Yahweh, 
must  have  been  constantly  called  in  to  assist  the  custom- 
ary judges ;  and  so  the  habit  of  appeal  must  have  grown 
in  Israel  long  before  there  was  any  king.     Thus  also  a 
common    standard    of  judgment    would   be    established. 
That   standard   must  necessarily  have   been    the    law    of 
Yahweh,  i.e.  the  new  Yahwistic  principles  and  all  that  might 
prima  facie  be  deduced  from  them,  together  with  so  much 
of  custom  and  tradition  as  had  been  accepted  as  compatible 
with  these  principles.     We  have  stated  the  reasons  for 
holding  that  the  Decalogue  was  Mosaic,  and  the  Book  of  the 
Covenant  may  be  taken  also  to  represent  what  the  current 
law  in  Mosaic  or  sub-Mosaic  time  was  held  to  be.    As  Oort 
well  says  {loc.  ciL),  when  we  know  that  the  Hittites  about 
'  Cl.  Nowack,  Die  sozialen  Probleme  in  Israel,  p.  5. 


382  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  middle  of  the  fourteenth  century  b.c.  concluded  a  treaty 
with  Rameses  II.  of  Egypt  the  terms  of  which  were  written 
upon  a  silver  plate,  "  why  may  there  not  also  have  been 
written  statements  regarding  the  mutual  rights  and  duties 
of  the  people  of  a  town,  engraved  upon  stone  or  metal, 
and  set  forth  openly  for  inspection  ?  "  What  he  confines 
to  mere  town  business  and  refers  to  the  time  of  the 
Judges,  we  may  without  risk  extend  to  a  general  funda- 
mental law  like  the  Decalogue,  or  even  to  the  Book  of  the 
Covenant,  and  date  it  in  the  time  of  Moses.  Writing 
was  so  common  an  accomplishment  in  Canaan  before  the 
Exodus,  that  such  a  supposition  is  not  in  the  least 
improbable.  These  written  laws  formed  the  crown  of  the 
law  of  Yahweh,  and  by  them  all  the  rest  was  raised  to  a 
higher  level  and  transformed. 

As  new  men,  new  times,  and  new  difficulties  arose, 
the  priest  became  the  special  organ  of  Divine  direction. 
It  may  be  that  the  priestly  Torah  was  largely  the  result 
of  the  sacred  lot ;  but  the  questions  that  were  put,  and 
the  mianner  in  which  they  were  put,  would  be  decided 
ultimately  by  the  conception  the  priest  had  of  the  truth 
about  God.  The  teaching  of  the  Decalogue  would  there- 
fore be  the  dominant  and  formative  power  in  all  that  was 
spoken  by  the  priest  and  for  Yahweh.  In  the  disorgan- 
ised state  into  which  Israel  fell  during  the  time  of  the 
Judges,  when,  as  Deuteronomy  takes  for  granted,  and 
as  I  Kings  iii.  2  and  3  asserts,  the  legitimate  worship  of 
Yahweh  was  carried  on  at  many  centres,  the  substantial 
sameness  of  the  tradition  as  to  the  history  of  Israel,  in 
all  the  varied  forms  in  which  we  encounter  it,  is  proof 
sufficient  that  at  each  of  the  great  sanctuaries  (which  were 
certainly  in  the  hands  of  Levitical  priests)  the  treasure  of 
ancient  knowledge,  both  in  law  and  history,  was  carefully 
and    accurately    preserved.^      New    decisions    would    be 

'  Oort,  Oud-Israel  Rechtswesen,  p.   14. 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  383 

given,  but  they  came  through  men  penetrated  with  the 
high  thoughts  of  God,  and  of-  His  people's  destiny,  which 
Moses  had  so  fruitfully  set  forth.  This  was  the  element 
in  the  life  of  the  people  which  all  the  higher  minds  strove 
to  perpetuate,  and,  being  spiritual,  it  spiritualised  and 
raised  all  accessory  things.  Consequently  there  was, 
long  before  the  kingship,  what  was  equivalent  to  a 
national  feeling  of  the  highest  kind,  and  the  conception 
of  justice  and  its  administration  corresponded  to  that. 

In  the  Book  of  the  Covenant,  which  in  this  matter 
represents  so  early  a  period  that  there  is  no  mention  ot 
''judges,"  only  of  Pelilim,^  i.e.  arbitrators  (Exod.  xxi.  22), 
so  that  the  tribal  and  family  heads  can  alone  have 
exercised  judicial  functions,  we  find  the  most  solemn 
warnings  against  an}'-  legal  perversion  of  right  to  gain 
popularity,  against  yielding  to  the  vulgar  temptation  to 
oppress  the  poor,  or  to  the  subtler  and,  for  generous 
minds,  more  insidious  temptation,  to  give  an  unjust 
judgment  out  of  pity  for  the  poor.  Israel  was,  moreover, 
to  keep  far  from  bribery,  "  which  blindeth  them  that  have 
sight,  and  perverteth  righteous  causes."  In  no  way  was 
the  law  to  be  used  for  criminal  or  oppressive  purposes. 
From  the  very  first,  therefore,  in  Israel  the  higher 
principles  of  faith  and  life  set  themselves  to  combat  a 
oiitrance  the  tendency  to  unjust  judgment,  which  seems 
now,  at  least,  quite  ineradicable  in  the  East,  save  among 
the  Bedouin.^ 

A  still  higher  note  is  struck  in  the  repetition  of  the  law 
in  the  Book  of  Deuteronomy.  In  chap,  i.,  originally  part 
of  a  historic  introduction  to  the  book  proper,  we  read: 
**  Hear  the  causes  between  your  brethren,  and  judge 
righteously    between    a    man    and    his   brother,  and    the 

•  A  probable  parallel  to  these  may  be  found  in  the  non-official  arbiters 
mentioned  by  Doughty.    Arabia  Deserta,  vol.  i.  pp.  145  and  502-3. 
^  Doughty,  vol.  i.,  p.  249. 


384  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


Stranger  that  is  with  him.  Ye  shall  not  respect  persons 
in  judgment ;  ye  shall  hear  the  small  and  the  great  ahke  ; 
ye  shall  not  be  afraid  of  the  face  of  man  ;  for  the  judgment 
(i.e.  the  whole  judicial  process  and  function)  is  God's  ;  and 
the  cause  that  is  too  hard  for  you  ye  shall  bring  unto  me 
(Moses),  and  I  will  hear  it."  Yes,  the  judgment  is  God's. 
Just  as  the  whole  of  moral  duty  towards  man  was  raised 
by  the  Decalogue  to  a  new  and  more  intimate  relation  with 
God,  so  here  justice,  the  fundamental  necessity  of  a 
sound  and  stable  political  state,  is  lifted  out  of  the 
conflict  of  mean  and  selfish  motives,  in  which  it  must 
eventually  go  down,  and  is  set  on  high  as  a  matter  in 
which  the  righteous  God  is  supremely  concerned.  In 
this,  as  in  all  things,  Israel  was  called  to  a  lonely  eminence 
of  ideal  perfection  by  the  character  of  the  God  whom  they 
were  bound  to  serve.  Therefore  it  strikes  us  with  no 
surprise  that  justice  is  insisted  upon  almost  with  passion 
in  Deut.  xvii.  20  :  "  Justice,  justice  shalt  thou  pursue 
after,  that  thou  mayest  live  and  possess  the  land  which 
Yahweh  thy  God  giveth  thee " ;  or  that  it  is  made  one 
of  the  conditions  of  Israel's  permanence  as  a  nation.  In 
chap.  xxiv.  17  we  read,  ''  Thou  shalt  not  wrest  the  judgment 
of  the  stranger,  nor  of  the  fatherless  ;  nor  take  the  widow's 
raiment  to  pledge  "  ;  in  xxv.  i  and  2,  "If  there  be  a  plea 
between  men,  .  .  .  then  they  (i.e.  the  judges)  shall  justify 
the  righteous  and  condemn  the  wicked."  For  any  other 
course  of  conduct  would  bring  guilt  upon  the  nation  in 
the  sight  of  Yahweh  ;  and  how  jealously  that  was  guarded 
against  is  seen  in  the  sacrifice  and  ritual  imposed  for  the 
purification  of  the  people  from  the  guilt  of  a  murder  the 
perpetrator  of  which  was  unknown  (Deut.  xxi.  1-9). 
Unatoned  for  and  disregarded,  such  a  crime  brought 
disturbance  into  those  relations  between  Israel  and  their 
God  upon  which  their  very  existence  as  a  nation  depended  ; 
and  the  disregard  of  justice,  where  wrongs  were  committed 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  385 

by  known  persons  and  were  left  unpunished,  was  of 
course  more  deadly.  So  the  author  of  Deuteronomy 
looked  upon  it ;  and  the  prophets,  from  the  first  of  them  to 
the  last,  brand  unjust  judgment,  the  perverting  the  eourse 
of  legal  justice,  as  the  most  alarming  sign  of  national  decay. 
The  righteous  God,  with  whom  there  was  no  respect  of 
persons,  could  not  permanently  favour  a  people  whose 
judges  and  rulers  disregarded  righteousness  ;  and  when 
destruction  actually  came  upon  this  people,  it  was  pro- 
claimed to  be  God's  doing,  ''  because  there  was  no  truth 
nor  justice  nor  knowledge  of  God  in  the  land." 

Nowhere  in  the  world,  therefore,  has  the  demand  for 
justice  been  made  more  central  than  here,  and  nowhere 
has  injustice  been  more  passionately  fought  against.     Nor 
have  the  sanctions  binding  to  a  pursuit  of  justice  been  at 
any  period  more  nobly  or   more   vividly   conceived.     In 
this  main  point,  therefore,  Israel's  law  stands  irreproach- 
able— marvellously  so,  considering  its  great  antiquity.     But 
we   have    still   to   inquire   whether   any  really   adequate 
provision  was  made  for  the  general  and  inexpensive  ad- 
ministration of  justice.     To  take  the  latter  first,  law  was 
in    old   Israel  probably  as  cheap  as   it  would   be  in  the 
primitive  East  to-day,  if  bribery  were  to  be  stopped.     To 
advise  as  to  the  sacred  law,  to  plead  for  justice  according 
to  it,  did  not  then,  and  does   not  now  in  similar  circum- 
stances, belong  to  any  special  professional  class  who  live 
by  it.     The  priest  could  be  appealed  to  freely  by  all ;  and 
the  heads  of  fathers'  houses,  as  well  as  the  tribal  heads, 
were,  by  the  very  fact  that  they  were  such,  bound  to  give 
judgment  among  their  people,  and  to  appear  for  and  take 
responsibility    for   them    when    they    had    a    cause    with 
persons  beyond  the  limits  of  the  particular  families  and 
tribes.     Justice,  consequently,    was    in    ordinary  circum- 
stances perfectly  free  to  all. 

And  from  a  very  early  _time  earnest  efforts  were  made 

25 


386  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

to  make  it  equally  accessible.  At  first,  when  the  people 
were  in  one  army  or  train,  before  they  came  to  Sinai,  an 
overwhelming  burden  was  laid  upon  Moses.  As  the 
prophet  of  the  new  dispensation  all  difficulties  were 
brought  to  him.  But  at  Jethro's  suggestion,  as  JE  tells  us 
in  Exod.  xviii.  13  ff.,  and  as  Deuteronomy  repeats  in  chap, 
i.  16,  he  chose  men  of  each  tribe,  or  took  the  heads  of 
each  tribe,  and  set  them  as  captains  of  thousands  and 
hundreds  and  fifties  and  tens.  Not  improbably  this  was 
primarily  a  military  organisation,  but  to  these  captains 
was  committed  also  jurisdiction  over  those  under  them. 
In  all  ordinary  cases  they  judged  them  and  their  families 
in  the  spirit  of  Yahwism,  as  well  as  commanded  them ; 
and  in  this  way,  as  has  already  been  pointed  out,  the 
customary  law  was  revised  in  accordance  with  Yahwistic 
principles.  Justice  too  was  brought  to  every  man's  door. 
The  only  question  that  suggests  itself  is,  whether  these 
captain-judges  were  the  ordinar3^  family  and  tribal  heads, 
organised  for  this  purpose  by  Moses.  On  the  whole 
this  would  seem  to  have  been  so,  and  it  may  well  be 
that  Jethro's  suggestion  had  in  view  the  danger  of  ignoring 
them,  as  well  as  the  burden  which  Moses'  sole  judgeship 
laid  upon  him.  But  with  the  advance  to  the  conquest  of 
Canaan  a  new  situation  emerged,  and  the  probability  is 
that  more  and  more,  as  the  tribes  fell  into  entire  or  semi- 
isolation,  the  tribal  organisation  in  its  natural  shape 
would  come  to  the  front  again.  Deuteronomy,  however, 
tells  us  Httle  if  anything  of  this.  In  the  main  passage 
regarding  this  matter  (xvii.  8-13),  where  provision  is 
made  for  an  appeal  to  a  central  court,  the  legislation  is 
entirely  for  a  period  much  later  than  Moses.  Like  the 
law  regarding  sacrifice  at  one  altar,  the  judicial  provisions 
of  Deuteronomy  seem  all  to  be  bound  up  with  the 
place  which  Yahweh  shall  choose,  viz.  the  Solomonic 
Temple  in   Jerusalem.      We  may  consequently  conclude 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  387 


that  the  judicial  arrangements  to  which  Deuteronomy 
alludes  existed  only  after  the  Israelite  kingship  had  been 
for  some  time  established  at  Jerusalem.  We  have  no 
distinct  evidence  for  the  existence  of  a  central  high  court 
in  David's  days ;  and  from  the  story  of  Absalom's  rebelHon 
we  should  gather  that  the  old,  simple  Oriental  method 
still  prevailed,  according  to  which  the  king,  Hke  the  heads 
of  tribes,  families,  etc.,  judged  every  one  who  came  to  him, 
personally,  at  the  gate  of  the  royal  city.  But  Samuel 
is  said  in  i  Sam.  vii.  16  to  have  annually  gone  on  circuit 
to  Bethel,  Gilgal,  and  Mizpah.  According  to  the  school 
of  Wellhausen,  nearly  the  whole  of  this  chapter  is  the 
work  of  a  Deuteronomic  writer  about  the  year  600.  In 
that  case,  of  course,  it  would  be  difficult  to  prove  that  the 
arrangement  attributed  to  Samuel  was  not  a  mere  echo 
of  what  was  done  in  Josiah's  day ;  though,  if  the  Deuter- 
onomic prescriptions  were  carried  out  then,  there  would 
be  no  need  for  such  a  system.  On  the  other  hand,  if 
Budde  and  Cornill  be  right  in  tracing  the  chapter  back 
to  JE,  this  habit  of  going  on  circuit  must  have  been  an 
ancient  one,  possibly  dating  from  Samuel's  time.  That 
this  latter  view  is  the  correct  one  is  in  a  degree  confirmed 
by  the  statement  in  viii.  2  that  Samuel's  sons  were 
installed  by  him  as  judges  in  Israel,  at  Beersheba.  This 
belongs  to  E,  and  it  would  seem  to  indicate  the  beginnings 
of  such  a  system  as  Deuteronomy  presupposes. 

But  it  is  only  in  the  days  of  Jehoshap'liat  (873 — 
849  B.C.)  that  an  arrangement  like  that  in  Deuteronomy  is 
mentioned.  From  2  Chron.  xix.  5  ff.  we  learn  that  "  he 
set  judges  in  the  land  throughout  all  the  fenced  cities 
of  Judah,  city  by  city.  Moreover  in  Jerusalem  did 
Jehoshaphat  set  of  the  Levites  and  of  the  priests,  and  of 
the  heads  of  the  fathers'  houses,  for  the  judgment  of 
Yahweh  and  for  controversies."  Further,  it  is  stated 
that  Amariah  the  chief  priest  was  set  over  the  judges  in 


THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


Jerusalem  in  all  Yahweh's  matters,  i.e.  in  all  religious 
questions,  and  Zebadiah  the  son  of  Ishmael  the  prince  of 
the  house  of  Judah  in  all  the  king's  matters,  i.e.  in  all 
secular  affairs.  Of  course  few  advanced  critics  will  admit 
that  the  Books  of  Chronicles  are  reliable  in  such  matters. 
But  that  judgment  is  altogether  too  sweeping,  and  here 
we  would  seem  to  have  a  well-authenticated  record  of 
what  Jehoshaphat  actually  did. 

For  it  will  be  observed,  that  when  we  take  up  the 
various  notices  in  regard  to  the  administration  of  justice, 
we  have  a  well-defined  progress  from  Moses  to  Jehoshaphat. 
Moses  was  chief  judge  and  committed  ordinary  cases  to 
the  tribal  and  family  heads  who  were  chosen  as  military 
leaders,  each  judging  his  own  detachment.  After  passing 
the  Jordan,  the  whole  matter  would  seem  to  have  fallen 
back  into  the  hands  of  the  tribal  heads,  with  the  occasional 
help  of  the  heroes  who  delivered  and  judged  Israel.  At 
the  end  of  this  period  Samuel,  as  head  of  the  State,  went 
on  circuit,  and  appointed  his  sons  judges  in  Beersheba, 
thus  initiating  a  new  system,  which,  had  it  been  successful, 
might  have  superseded  the  tribal  and  family  heads 
altogether.  But  it  was  a  failure,  and  was  not  repeated. 
With  the  rise  of  the  kingship  the  courts  received  further 
organisation.  If  the  Chronicler  can  be  trusted,  Levites  to 
the  number  of  six  thousand  were  appointed  to  be  judges 
and  Shoterim.  The  number  seems  excessive ;  but  the 
appointment  of  Levites  to  act  as  assessors  with  the  tribal 
and  other  heads  would  be  a  natural  expedient  for  a  king 
like  David  to  have  recourse  to,  if  he  desired  to  secure 
uniformity  of  judgment,  and  to  bring  the  courts  under 
his  personal  influence.  The  next  step  would  naturally 
be  that  which  is  attributed  to  Jehoshaphat,  and  it  is 
precisely  that  which  Deuteronomy  points  to  as  being 
already  at  work  in  his  time.  We  have,  consequently, 
more    than    the    late    authority    of    the]  Chronicler    for 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  389 

Jehoshaphat's  high  court.  The  probabihties  of  the 
case  point  so  strongly  to  the  rise  of  some  such  judicial 
system  about  that  period,  that  it  would  require  some 
positive  proof,  not  mere  negative  suspicion,  to  lead  us  to 
reject  the  narrative.  In  any  case  this  must  have  been 
the  system  in  Josiah's  day,  and  afterwards.  For  when 
Jeremiah  was  arraigned  for  prophesying  destruction  to 
the  Temple  and  to  Jerusalem,  the  process  against  him 
was  conducted  on  similar  lines  to  those  laid  down  in 
Deuteronomy.  The  princes  judged,  the  priests  (curiously 
enough  along  with  the  false  prophets)  made  the  charge, 
i.e.  stated  that  the  prophet's  conduct  was  worthy  of  death, 
and  the  princes  acquitted.  During  the  Exile  it  is  probable 
that  the  "  elders  "  of  the  people  were  permitted  to  judge 
them  in  all  ordinary  cases,  but  we  have  no  certain  proof 
that  this  was  so.  After  the  return  from  Babylon,  however, 
the  local  courts  were  re-established,  probably  in  the  very 
form  in  which  they  appear  in  the  New  Testament  (Matt, 
v.  22,  X.  17;  Mark  xiii.  9;  Luke  xii.  14-58). 

Throughout  the  whole  history  of  Israel,  therefore,  courts 
of  justice  were  easily  accessible  to  every  man,  whether 
he  were  rich  or  poor.  No  doubt  the  free,  open-air. 
Eastern  manner  of  administering  justice  was  favourable 
to  that ;  but  from  the  days  of  Moses  onward  we  have 
fairly  conclusive  proof  that  the  leaders  of  the  people  made 
it  their  continual  care  that  wherever  a  wrong  was  suffered 
there  should  be  some  court  to  which  an  appeal  for  redress 
could  be  made. 

The  justice  aimed  at  in  Israel  was,  therefore,  impartial 
and  accessible.  We  have  still  to  inquire  whether  it  was 
merciful  or  cruel  in  its  infliction  of  punishment.  Dr.  Oort 
says  it  was  a  hard  law  in  this  respect,  but  one  is  at  a  loss 
to  see  how  that  view  can  be  sustained.  There  is  no  men- 
tion of  torture  in  connection  with  legal  proceedings,  either 
in  the  history  or  in  the  legislation.   Nor  is  there  any  instance 


390  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

mentioned  in  which  an  accused  person  was  imprisoned 
until  he  confessed.  Indeed  imprisonment  would  not  appear 
to  have  been  a  legal  punishment  in  Israel,  nor  in  any  antique 
state.  The  idea  of  providing  maintenance  for  those  who  had 
offended  against  the  law  was  one  which  could  never  have 
occurred  to  any  one  in  antiquity.  Prisons  are,  of  course,  fre- 
quently mentioned  in  Scripture  ;  but  they  were  used,  up  to 
the  time  of  Ezra,  only  for  the  safe-keeping  of  persons 
charged  with  crime  till  they  could  be  brought  before  the 
judges.  Sometimes,  as  in  the  case  of  the  prophets,  men 
were  imprisoned  to  prevent  them  from  stirring  up  the 
people ;  but  this  procedure  was  nowhere  sanctioned  by  law. 
Further,  the  crimes  for  which  the  punishment  prescribed 
in  the  ancient  law  was  death  were  few.  Idolatry,  adultery, 
unnatural  lust,  sorcery,  and  murder  or  manslaughter, 
together  with  striking  or  cursing  parents  and  kidnapping 
— these  were  all.  Considering  that  idolatry  and  sorcery 
were  high  treason  in  its  worst  forms,  so  far  as  this  people 
was  concerned,  and  that  impurity  threatened  the  family 
in  a  much  more  direct  and  immediate  fashion  then  than  it 
does  now,  while  the  people  were  naturally  inclined  to  it, 
one  must  wonder  that  the  list  of  capital  crimes  is  so  short. 
Contrast  this  with  Blackstone's  statement  in  regard  to 
England  (quoted  Ency.  Brit.j  iv.,  p.  589):  "Among  the 
variety  of  actions  which  men  are  daily  liable  to  commit, 
no  less  than  one  hundred  and  sixty  have  been  declared 
by  Act  of  Parliament  to  be  felonies  without  benefit  of 
clergy,  or,  in  other  words,  to  be  worthy  of  instant  death." 
It  is  only  in  comparatively  recent  years  that  the  punish- 
ment of  death  has  been  practically  restricted  to  murder 
in  England.  Yet  that  is  almost  the  case  in  the  ancient 
Jev/ish  law ;  for  the  exceptions  are  such  as  would  re- 
appear in  England  if  it  were  more  sparsely  populated 
and  manners  were  rougher.  In  Australia,  for  example, 
highway  robbery  under  arms  and  violence  to  women  are 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  391 

capital  crimes,  just  because  the  country  is  sparsely  inhabited 
and  the  households  unprotected.  Nor  were  the  modes 
of  death  inflicted  cruel.  Only  three — viz.  impalement, 
and  burning,  and  stoning — appear  to  be  so.  But  it  may 
be  believed  that  in  the  cases  contemplated  by  the  law 
death  in  some  less  painful  manner  had  preceded  the 
two  former,  as  is  certainly  the  case  in  Josh.  vii.  15  and 
25,  and  in  Deut.  xxi.  22.  As  for  the  latter,  it  must  have  been 
horrible  to  look  upon,  but  in  all  probability  the  criminal's 
agony  was  rarely  a  prolonged  one.  The  other  method 
of  execution,  by  the  sword  namely,  was  humane  enough. 
Dr.  Oort  tells  us  that  mutilations  were  common  ;  but  his 
proof  is  only  this,  that  in  the  treaty  between  the  Hittite 
king  and  Rameses  II.  we  read,  concerning  inhabitants 
of  Egypt  who  have  fled  to  the  land  of  the  Hittites  and 
have  been  returned,  ''  His  mother  shall  not  be  put  to  death  ; 
he  shall  not  be  punished  in  his  eyes,  nor  on  his  mouth, 
nor  on  the  soles  of  his  feet."  The  same  provision  is 
made  for  Hittite  fugitives.  From  this  evidence  of  the 
custom  of  surrounding  peoples,  and  from  the  fact  that 
the  jus  talionis  is  announced  in  the  Scriptures  by  the 
familiar  formula,  ''  Eye  for  eye,  tooth  for  tooth,  hand  for 
hand,  foot  for  foot,"  Dr.  Oort  draws  this  conclusion.  But 
he  appears  to  forget  that  the  jus  talionis  was  common  to 
almost  all  the  peoples  of  the  ancient  world,  and  is  referred 
to  in  the  Pentateuch,  not  as  a  new  principle,  but  as  a 
custom  coming  down  from  immemorial  time.  Conse- 
quently, though  there  must  once  have  been  a  time  in 
which  it  was  carried  out  in  its  literal  form,  that  time 
probably  was  past  when  the  laws  referring  to  it  were 
written.  In  Rome,  and  probably  in  other  lands  where 
this  custom  existed,  it  early  gave  place  to  the  custom  of 
giving  and  receiving  money  payments.  Most  probably 
this  was  the  case  in  Israel,  at  least  from  the  time  of  the 
Exodus.     For  the  new  religion  introduced  by  Moses  was 


392  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

■  merciful.    But  these  references  to  the  principle  of  retaliation 

tell  us  nothing  as  to  the  frequency  or  otherwise  of  mutilation 

as  a  punishment.     No  instance  of  mutilation  being  inflicted 

either  as  a  retaliation  or  as  a  punishment  occurs  in  the 

Old  Testament,   and   the   probability   is  that  cases  were 

never  numerous.     Apart  from  retaliation  they  are  never 

mentioned ;  and  we  may,  I  think,  set  it  down  as  one  of 

the  distinctive  merits  of  the  Israelite  law  that  it  never  was 

betrayed  into  sanctioning  the  cutting  off  of  hands  or  feet 

or  ears  or  noses  as  general  punishment  for  crime.     But 

so  far  as  the  principle  of  the  lex  talionis  was  retained,  its 

effect  was  wholesome.     It  was  a  continual  reminder  that 

all    free  Israelites  were  equals  in   the   sight   of  Yahweh. 

And  not  only  so,  it  enforced  as  well  as  asserted  equality. 

Any  poor  man  mutilated  by  a  rich  man  could  demand  the 

infliction  of  the  same  wound  upon  his  oppressor.     He  could 

reject  his  excuses,  and  refuse  his  money,  and  bring  home 

to  him  the  truth  that  they  had  equal  rights  and  duties. 

In  this  way  this  seemingly  harsh  law  helped  to  lay 
the  foundation  for  our  modern  conception  of  humanity, 
which  regards  all  men  as  brethren.  For  the  teaching 
of  our  Lord,  which  fulfilled  all  that  the  polity  and  religion 
of  ancient  Israel  had  foreshadowed  of  good,  broke  down 
the  walls  of  partition  between  Jew  and  Gentile,  and  made 
all  men  brethren  by  revealing  to  them  a  common  Father. 
It  surely  is  strange  and  sad  that  those  who  specially 
make  liberty,  equality,  and  fraternity  their  watchwords, 
have  received  so  false  an  impression  of  the  religion  of 
both  the  Old  and  New  Testaments,  that  they  pride  them- 
selves on  rejecting  both.  When  all  is  said,  the  levelling 
of  barriers  which  the  crushing  weight  of  Roman  power 
brought  about,  and  the  common  methods  and  elements 
of  thought  which  the  Greek  conquests  had  spread  all  over 
the  civilised  world,  would  never  have  made  the  brother- 
hood of  man  the  universally  accepted  doctrine  it  is.     The 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  393 

truths  which  made  it  credible  caine  from  the  revelation 
given  by  God  to  His  chosen  people,  and  its  final  and 
conclusive  impulse  was  given  to  it  by  the  lips  of 
Christ. 

In  face  of  that  cardinal  fact  it  is  vain  to  point  out 
as  one  of  the  defects  of  this  law  that  all  men  were  not 
equal  before  it.  Women  were  not  equal  with  men,  nor 
were  foreigners  nor  slaves  equal  with  freeborn  Israelites  ; 
but  the  seed  of  all  that  later  times  were  to  bring  was 
already  there.  The  principles  which  at  the  long  end  of 
the  day  have  abolished  slavery,  raised  women  to  the 
equal  position  they  now  occupy,  and  made  peace  with 
foreigners  increasingly  the  desire  of  all  nations,  had  their 
first  hold  upon  men  given  them  here.  In  all  these 
directions  the  Mosaic  law  was  epoch-making.  In  the 
fifth  commandment,  as  well  as  in  the  legislation  regarding 
the  punishment  of  a  rebellious  son,  the  mother  is  put  upon 
the  same  level  as  the  father.  However  subordinate 
woman's  position  in  the  larger  public  life  might  be,  within 
the  home  she  was  to  be  respected.  There,  in  her  true 
domain,  she  was  man's  equal,  and  was  acknowledged  to 
have  an  equal  claim  to  reverence  from  her  children. 

In  precisely  the  same  way  the  ^'  stranger "  was  freed 
from  disability  and  protected.  In  the  earliest  days,  when 
the  Israelite  community  was  still  being  formed,  whole 
groups  of  strangers  were  received  into  it  and  obtained  full 
rights,  as  for  example  the  Kenites  and  Kenizzites.  But 
though  this  was  a  promise  of  what  Israel  was  ultimately 
to  be  to  the  world,  the  necessities  of  the  situation,  the  need 
to  keep  intact  the  treasure  of  higher  religion  which  was 
committed  to  this  people,  compelled  the  adoption  of  a  more 
separatist  policy.  Yet  "  in  no  other  nation  of  antiquity 
were  strangers  received  and  treated  with  such  liberahty 
and  humanity  as  in  Israel."  They  were  freely  afforded 
the  protection  of  the  law  ;  they  were,  in  short,  received  as 


394  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

''  a  kind  of  haif-citizens,  v/ith  definite  rights  and  duties."  ^ 
Further,  though  the  ger  was  not  bound  to  all  the  religious 
practices  and  rites  of  the  Israelite,  yet  he  was  permitted, 
and  in  some  cases  commanded,  to  take  part  in  their' 
religious  worship.  If  he  consented  to  circumcise  all  his 
house  he  might  even  share  in  the  Passover  feast.  All 
oppression  of  such  an  one  was  also  rigorously  forbidden, 
and  to  a  large  extent  the  stranger  shared  in  the  benefits 
conferred  by  the  provision  for  the  poor  of  the  land  which 
the  law  made  compulsory. 

Nor  was  the  case  otherwise  with  slaves.  Equality 
there  was  not,  and  could  not  be ;  but  in  the  provi- 
sions for  the  emancipation  of  the  Israelite  slave  and 
the  introduction  of  penalties  for  undue  harshness,  it 
began  to  be  recognised  that  the  slave  stood,  in  som^e 
degree  at  least,  on  the  same  level  as  his  master — he  too 
was  a  man. 

Taking  it  as  a  whole,  therefore,  the  ancient  world  will 
be  searched  in  vain  for  any  legislation  equal  to  this 
in  the  ^*  promise  and  the  potency "  of  its  fundamental 
ideas  as  to  justice.  Here,  as  nov/here  else,  we  can  see 
the  radical  principles  which  should  dominate  in  the 
administration  of  justice  laying  hold  upon  mankind,  and 
that  there  was  a  living  will  and  power  behind  these 
principles  is  shown  in  the  steady  movement  toward  some- 
thing higher  which  characterised  Israelite  law.  In  the 
pursuit  of  impartiality,  accessibility,  and  humanit}^,  the 
teachers  of  Israel  were  untiring,  and  the  sanctions  by 
which  they  surrounded  and  guarded  all  that  tended  to 
make  the  administration  of  justice  effective  in  the  high 
sense  were  unusually  solemn  and  powerful.  The  result 
has  been  most  remarkable.  All  the  ages  of  civilised  men 
since  have  been  the  heirs  of  Israel  in  this  matter.     Roman 

'  Riehm,  Handwoi'terbuch,  Baethgen,  vol.  i.,  p.  463. 


JUSTICE  IN  ISRAEL  395 

influence  and  the  influence  of  the  Christian  Church  have 
no  doubt  been  powerful,  and  the  manifold  exigencies  of 
life  have  drawn  out  and  made  explicit  much  which  was 
only  implicit  in  the  ancient  days.  But  the  higher  qualities 
of  our  modern  administration  of  justice  can  be  traced  back 
step  by  step  to  Biblical  principles,  and  the  course  of 
development  laid  bare.  When  that  is  done,  it  is  seen 
that  the  almost  ideal  purity  and  impartiality  of  the  best 
modern  tribunals  is  the  completion  of  what  the  Israelite 
law  and  methods  began.  In  this  one  instance  at  least 
the  great  Mosaic  principles  have  come  to  fruition  ;  and 
from  the  security  and  peace,  the  contentment  and  the 
confidence,  with  which  impartial  justice  has  filled  the 
minds  of  men,  we  can  estimate  how  potent  to  cure  the  ills 
of  our  social  and  moral  state  the  realisation  of  the  other 
great  Mosaic  ideals  would  be.  It  should  be  a  source 
of  encouragement  to  all  who  look  for  a  time  when  ''  the 
kingdoms  of  this  world  shall  become  the  kingdoms  of  our 
Lord  and  of  His  Christ,"  that  something  like  the  ideal  of 
justice  has  so  far  been  realised.  It  has  no  doubt  been  a 
weary  time  in  coming,  and  it  has  as  yet  but  a  narrow  and 
perhaps  precarious  footing  in  the  world.  But  it  is  here, 
with  its  healing  and  beneficent  activity  ;  and  in  that  fact  we 
may  well  see  a  pledge  that  all  the  rest  of  the  Divinely 
given  ideals  for  the  Kingdom  of  God  will  one  day  be 
realised  also.  Such  a  consummation,  however  remote  it 
may  seem  to  our  human  impatience,  however  devious  and 
winding  the  paths  by  which  alone  it  can  draw  near,  will 
come  most  surely,  and  in  our  approach  to  the  ideal  in  our 
judicial  system  we  may  well  see  the  firstfruits  of  a 
richer  and  more  plentiful  harvest. 


CHAPTER   XXII 

LAIVS   OF  PURITY  (CHASTITY  AND  MARRIAGE) 

IN  dealing  with  the  ten  commandments  it  has  been 
already  shown  that,  though  these  great  statements 
of  religious  and  moral  truth  were  to  some  extent  inadequate 
as  expressions  of  the  highest  life,  they  yet  contained  the 
living  germs  of  all  that  has  followed.  But  we  cannot 
suppose  that  the  reality  of  Israelite  life  from  the  first 
corresponded  with  them.  They  contained  much  that  only 
the  experience  and  teaching  of  ages  could  fully  bring 
to  light ;  therefore  we  cannot  expect  that  the  actual  laws 
in  regard  to  the  relations  of  the  sexes  and  the  virtue 
of  chastity  should  stand  upon  the  same  high  level  as 
the  Decalogue.  The  former  represent  the  reality,  this 
the  ultimate  ideal  of  Israelite  law  on  these  subjects.  But 
neither  is  unimportant  in  forming  an  estimate  of  the  value 
of  the  revelation  given  to  Israel,  and  of  the  moral  condition 
of  early  Israel  itself,  nor  can  either  be  justly  viewed 
altogether  alone.  The  actual  law  at  any  moment  in  the 
history  of  Israel  must  be  regarded  as  inspired  and  up- 
borne by  the  ideal  set  forth  in  the  ten  commandments. 
But  it  must,  at  the  same  time,  be  a  very  incomplete 
reaHsation  of  these,  and  its  various  stages  will  be  best 
regarded  as  instalments  of  advance  towards  that  compara- 
tive perfection. 

In  regard  to  the  relations  of  the  sexes  and  the  virtue 
of  purity  this  must  be  peculiarly  the  case.  For  though 
chastity  has  been  safeguarded   by  almost  all  nations  up 

396 


LAWS   OF  PURITY  (CHASTITY  AND  MARRIAGE)     397 

to  a  certain  low  point,  it  has  never  been  really  cherished  by 
any  naturalistic  system.  Nor  has  it  ever  been  favoured 
by  mere  humanism.^  Consequently  there  is  no  point  of 
morals  in  regard  to  which  man  has  more  conspicuously 
failed  to  work  out  the  merely  animal  impulse  from  his 
nature  than  in  this.  And  yet,  for  all  the  higher  ends 
of  life,  as  well  as  for  the  prosperity  and  vigour  of  man- 
kind, purity  in  the  sexual  relations  is  entirely  vital.  One 
great  cause  of  the  decay  of  nations,  nay,  even  of  civilisa- 
tions, has  been  the  abandonment  of  this  virtue.  This 
was  the  main  cause  of  the  destruction  of  the  Canaanites. 
It  may  even  be  said  to  have  been  the  cause  of  the  wreck 
of  the  whole  ancient  world.  We  should  consequently 
measure  what  the  Mosaic  influence  did  for  purity  of  life, 
not  by  comparing  early  Israelite  laws  with  what  has  been 
accomplished  by  Christianity,  but  with  the  condition  of 
the  Semitic  peoples  surrounding  Israel,  in  and  after  the 
Mosaic  times. 

What  that  was  we  know.  Their  religions,  far  from 
discouraging  sexual  immorality,  made  it  a  part  of  their 
holiest  rites.  Both  men  and  women  gave  themselves 
up  to  natural  and  unnatural  lusts,  in  honour  of  their  gods. 
To  the  north,  and  south,  and  east,  and  west  of  Israel  these 
practices  prevailed,  and  as  a  natural  result  the  moral 
fabric  of  these  nations'  life  fell  into  utter  ruin.  In  private 
life  adultery,  and  the  still  more  degrading  sin  of  Sodom 
were  common.  The  man  had  a  right  to  indiscriminate 
divorce  and  remarriage,  and  marriage  connections  now 
reckoned  incestuous,  such  as  those  between  brother  and 
sister,  were  entirely  approved.     In  all  these  points  Israel 


^  Cf,  Renan,  Philosophic  Dialogues,  iii,  p.  26:  "La  nature  a  interet 
a  ce  que  la  femme  soit  chaste  et  a  ce  que  rhomme  ne  le  soit  pas  trop.  De 
la  un  ensemble  d'opinions  qui  couvre  d'infamie  la  femme  non  chaste,  et 
frappe  presque  de  ridicule  I'homme  chaste.  Et  I'opinion  quand  elle  est 
profonde,  obstinee,  c'est  la  nature  mcme." 


398  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

as  a  nation  was  without  reproach.  The  higher  teaching 
this  people  had  received  in  respect  to  the  character  of 
God,  and  it  may  be  some  reminiscence  of  Egyptian  custom, 
which  was  in  some  respects  purer  than  that  of  the  Semitic 
peoples,  raised  them  to  a  higher  level.  Yet  in  the  main 
the  early  Israehte  view  of  women  was  fundamentally  the 
uncivilised  one. 

But  at  all  periods  of  Israelite  history,  even  the  earliest, 
women  had  asserted  their  personality.  In  the  eye  of  the 
law  they  might  be  the  chattels  of  their  male  relatives,  but 
as  a  fact  they  were  dealt  with  as  persons,  with  many 
personal  rights.  They  had  no  independent  position  in 
the  community,  it  is  true.  They  could  take  no  part  in 
a  festival  so  important  as  the  Passover,  nor  were  they 
free  to  make  vows  without  the  consent  of  their  husbands. 
In  other  ways  also  social  restraints  were  laid  upon  them. 
Nevertheless  their  position  in  early  Israel  was  much 
higher  than  it  is  in  the  East  to-day,  and  their  liberty  was 
in  no  wise  unreasonably  abridged.  In  David's  day  women 
could  appear  in  public  to  converse  with  men  without 
scandal.^  They  also  took  part  in  religious  festivals  and 
processions,  giving  hfe  to  them  by  beating  their  timbrels, 
by  singing,  and  by  dancing.^  They  could  be  present  also 
at  all  ordinary  sacrifices  and  at  sacrificial  feasts ;  and,  as 
we  see  in  the  case  of  Deborah  and  others,  they  could 
occupy  a  high,  almost  a  supreme,  position  as  prophetesses. 
In  the  main,  too,  the  relations  between  husband  and  wife 
were  loving  and  respectful,  and  in  Israel's  best  days, 
when  the  people  still  remained  landed  yeomanry,  the  wife, 
by  her  industry  within  the  house,  supplemented  and  com- 
pleted her  husband's  labour  in  the  fields.  The  Israelite 
woman  was  consequently  a  very  important  person  in  the 
community,  whatever  her  status  in  law  might  be ;  and  if 

^  Cf.  I  Sam.  XXV.  i8  ft';  2  Sam.  xiv.  i  ft". 
-  Cf,  Exod.  XV.  and  i  Sam.  xviii,  6t". 


LAWS   OF  PURITY  (CHASTITY  AND  MARRIAGE)     399 

she  had  not  the  full  rights  which  are  now  granted  to  her 
sex  in  Western  and  Christian  lands,  her  position  was  for 
the  times  a  noble  and  independent  one.  That  all  this 
was  so  was  largely  due  to  the  improvements  which 
Mosaism  wrought  on  the  basis  of  that  ancient  Semitic 
custom  which  we  sketched  at  the  beginning  of  this  chapter, 
and  with  which  it  seems  natural  to  suppose  the  Israelite 
tribes  had  also  begun. 

Bearing  these  preliminary  considerations  in  mind,  we 
now  go  on  to  consider  the  actual  legislation  in  regard  to 
the  relations  of  the  sexes.  But  here  we  must  once  more 
recall  the  fact  that,  in  regard  to  all  matters  vitally  affecting 
the  community,  there  had  always  been  a  custom,  and  even 
before  written  law  appears  that  custom  had  been  adopted 
and  modified  in  Yahwism  by  Moses  himself.  That  this 
was  actually  the  case  here  is  rendered  highly  probable 
by  the  history  of  legislation  in  this  matter.  In  the  Book  of 
the  Covenant  there  is  no  mention  of  sexual  sin,  save  in  one 
passage  (Exod.  xxii.  16),  where  the  penalty  for  seduction 
of  a  virgin  who  is  not  betrothed  is  that  the  seducer  shall 
offer  a  ''mohar"  for  her,  and  marry  her  without  possibility 
of  divorce,  if  her  father  consent.  If  he  will  not,  then  the 
''mohar"  is  forfeited  to  the  father  nevertheless,  as 
compensation  for  the  degradation  of  his  daughter.  But  it 
is  obvious  that  there  must  have  been  laws  or  customs 
regulating  marriage  other  than  this,  for  without  them  there 
could  have  been  no  such  crime  as  is  here  punished. 
Obviously,  also,  there  must  have  been  laws  or  customs  of 
divorce.  But  of  what  these  laws  of  marriage  and  divorce 
were  Exodus  gives  us  no  hint.  Deuteronomy,  the  next 
code,  which  on  the  critical  hypothesis  arose  at  a  much  later 
time  as  a  revision  of  the  Book  of  the  Covenant,  contains 
much  more,  ie.  it  draws  out  of  the  obscurity  of  unwritten 
custom  a  more  extensive  series  of  provisions  in  regard 
to  purity.     The  Law  of    Holiness    then   adds  largely    to 


400  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Deuteronomy,  and  with  it  the  main  points  of  the  law  of 
purity  have  attained  to  written  expression.  But  the  influence 
of  the  higher  standard  set  in  the  Decalogue  also  makes 
itself  felt, — not  in  the  law  so  much  as  in  the  historic  books 
and  the  prophets — and  our  task  now  is  to  trace  out  first 
the  legal  development,  then  the  prophetical,  and  to  show 
how  the  whole  movement  culminated  and  was  crowned  in 
the  teaching  of  Christ. 

Beginning  then  with  Deuteronomy,  we  find  that  the 
chastity  of  women  was  surrounded  by  ample  safeguards. 
Religious  prostitution  was  absolutely  prohibited  (Deut. 
xxiii.  1 8).  Further,  if  any  violence  was  done  to  a 
woman  who  had  been  betrothed,  the  punishment  of  the 
wrong  was  death ;  if  done  to  a  woman  who  was  not 
betrothed,  the  wrong  was  atoned  for  by  payment  of  fifty 
shekels  of  silver  to  her  father,  and  by  offering  marriage 
without  possibility  of  divorce.  If  marriage  was  refused, 
then  the  fifty  shekels  was  retained  by  the  father  in  con- 
sideration of  the  wrong  done  him.  When  the  woman 
was  a  sharer  in  the  guilt  the  punishment  in  all  cases  was 
death ;  while  pre-nuptial  unchastity,  when  discovered  after 
marriage,  was  punished,  as  adultery  also  was,  with  the 
same  severity.^  In  women  who  were  free,  therefore, 
purity  was  demanded  in  Israel  as  strenuously  as  it  ever 
has  been  anywhere,  though  in  man  the  only  limit  to  sexual 
indulgence  was  the  demand,  that  in  seeking  it  he  should 
not  infringe  upon  the  father's  property  in  his  daughter, 
or  the  husband's  in  his  wife  or  his  betrothed  bride. 

Admittedly  the  original  underlying  motive  for  this  moral 
severity  was  a  low  one,  the  mere  proprietary  rights  of  the 
father  or  husband.  But  it  would  be  a  mistake  to  suppose 
that  purely  ethical  and  religious  motives  had  no  place  in 
establishing  the    customs  or  enactments  which    we   find 

'  Chap.  xxii.   13-18. 


LAIVS   OF  PURITY  (CHASTITY  AND  MARRIAGE)    401 

in  Deuteronomy.     With  the  lapse  of  time  higher  motives 
entwined   themselves  with  the  coarse  strand  of  personal 
proprietary  interest,  which  had  originally,  though  perhaps 
never  alone,  been  the  line  of  limitation.     Gradually  there 
grew  up  a  standard  of  higher  purity ;  and  when  Deuter- 
onomy  was  written,  though   the    original    line   was  still 
clearly  visible,  it  was  justified  by  appeals  to  a  moral  sense 
which  reached    far   beyond    the  original   motives   of  the 
customary    law.       The    continually    recurring    burden    of 
Deuteronomy  in    dealing   with  these   matters   is  that   to 
work  *^  folly  in   Israel  "   is   a  crime   for   which   only   the 
severest  punishment  can  atone.     To  "  extinguish  the  evil 
from    Israel,"   and   to    put    away   such    things   as   were 
''  abominations    to   Yahweh    their   God,"   are   the    great 
reasons  on  which  the  writer  of  Deuteronomy  founds  the 
claim  for  obedience  in  these  cases.     Obviously,  therefore, 
by  his  time,  under  the  teaching  of  the  religion  of  Yahweh, 
Israel  had  risen  to  a  moral  height  which  took  account  of 
graver  interests  than  the  rights  of  property  in  legislating  for 
female  purity.     The  cases  included  in   the  law  had  been 
determined  by  considerations  of  that  kind ;   but  the  sanc- 
tions by  which  the  commands  were  buttressed  had  entirely 
changed    their  character.     The  holiness  of  God  and  the 
dignity   of  man,    the   consideration   of   what   alone   was 
worthy  of  a  "  son  of  Israel,"  have  taken  the  place  of  the 
coarser  sanctions.     In  this  way  a  possibility  of  unlimited 
moral  progress   was  secured,   since  the  cause  of  purity 
was  indissolubly    bound   to   the  general  and   irresistible 
advance  of  religious  and  moral  enlightenment  in  the  chosen 
people. 

Moreover  the  personality  of  the  woman  was  acknow- 
ledged in  the  entire  acquittal  of  the  betrothed  woman  who 
had  been  exposed  to  outrage  in  the  country,  where  her 
cries  could  bring  no  help.  In  the  earliest  times  most 
probably  the  punishment  of  death  would  have  been  inflicted 

26 


402  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

equally  in  that  case,  since  the  husband's  property  had 
been  deteriorated  to  such  a  degree  as  to  make  it  unworthy 
of  him.  But  in  the  Deuteronomic  provision  quite  other 
things  are  drawn  into  the  estimate.  The  moral  guilt  of 
the  person  concerned  is  now  the  decisive  consideration. 
The  woman  has  ceased  to  be  a  mere  chattel,  and  the  full 
claims  of  her  personality  are  in  the  way  to  be  recognised. 
These  were  great  advances,  and  for  these  it  is  vain  to 
seek  for  other  causes  than  the  persistent  upward  pressure 
of  the  Mosaic  religion.  The  moral  superiority  of  Israel 
at  the  time  of  the  conquest  over  the  much  more  cultured 
Canaanites,  as  also  over  the  nomadic  tribes  to  which  they 
were  more  nearly  related,  is  due,  as  Stade  says,  ultimately 
to  their  religion ;  and  no  reader  of  the  Old  Testament,  in 
our  time  at  least,  can  fail  to  see  that  their  moral  progress 
in  the  land  they  conquered  depended  entirely  upon  the 
same  cause.  At  the  Deuteronomic  epoch  purity  had  already 
been  placed  upon  a  worthy  basis,  as  a  moral  achievement 
of  the  first  importance,  and  impurity  had  taken  its  proper 
place  as  a  degrading  sin.  But  much  still  remained  to 
be  done  before  these  principles  could  be  extended  into 
all  domains  of  life  equally. 

How  far  they  had  penetrated  in  early  times  may  per- 
haps best  be  seen  in  the  Deuteronomic  references  to 
divorce.  Before  Deuteronomy  there  is  no  law  of  divorce, 
nor  indeed  is  there  any  after  it.  We  may  perhaps  even 
say  that  there  is  in  it  not  so  much  the  statement  of  a. 
law  of  divorce,  as  a  reference  to  custom  which  the  writer 
wishes  to  correct  or  reinforce  in  one  particular  respect 
only.  Notwithstanding  the  Jewish  view,  therefore,  which 
finds  in  Deut.  xxiv.  1-4  a  divorce  law,  we  must  adduce 
the  passage  as  a  new  and  striking  proof  of  what  we  have 
all  along  asserted,  that  neither  Deuteronomy  nor  any  other 
of  the  legal  codes  can  be  taken  as  complete  statements 
of  what   was   legally   permitted    or    forbidden   in    Israel. 


LAPVS   OF  PURITY  (CHASTITY  AND  MARRIAGE)     403 


Behind  all  of  them  there  is  a  vast  mass  of  unwritten 
customary  law,  and  divorce  was  doubtless  always  deter- 
mined by  it.  That  this  was  the  case  will  be  seen  at  once 
if  the  passage  we  are  now  concerned  with  be  rightly 
translated.  It  runs  thus  :  ''  When  a  man  taketh  a  wife 
and  marrieth  her,  and  it  shall  be  (if  she  find  no  favour 
in  his  eyes,  because  he  hath  found  in  her  some  unseemly 
thing)  that  he  writeth  her  a  bill  of  divorcement,  and  giveth 
it  into  her  hand,  and  sendeth  her  out  of  his  house,  and 
she  go  forth  out  of  his  house  and  goeth  and  becometh  the 
wife  of  another  man,  and  if  the  latter  husband  also  hate 
her,  and  write  her  a  bill  of  divorcement,  and  give  it  in  her 
hand  and  send  her  out  of  his  house,  or  if  the  latter 
husband  die  who  took  her  to  him  to  wife,  then  her  former 
husband  who  sent  her  away  may  not  take  her  again  to 
be  his  wife  after  that  she  has  permitted  herself  to  be 
defiled."  All  the  passage  provides  for,  therefore,  is  that  a 
divorced  woman  shall  not  be  remarried  to  the  divorcing 
man  after  she  has  been  married  again,  even  though  she 
be  separated  from  her  second  husband  by  divorce  or 
death.  There  is  consequently  no  law  of  divorce  here 
stated.  There  is  merely  a  reference  to  a  general  law  or 
custom  by  which  divorce  was  permitted  for  "  any  unseemly 
thing,"  and  according  to  which  a  chief  wife  at  any  rate 
could  be  divorced  only  by  a  "  bill  of  divorcement,"  and 
not  by  mere  word  of  mouth,  as  is  common  in  many 
Eastern  lands  to-day.  Mosaic  influence  may  have 
procured  this  last  slight  increase  in  rigour,  and  Deuter- 
onomy certainly  adds  three  other  restrictions,  viz.  that 
after  remarriage  a  woman  cannot  be  again  married  to  her 
first  husband,  and  that  pre-nuptial  wrong  done  to  a  woman 
by  her  husband,  or  a  false  accusation  by  him  after 
marriage,  takes  away  his  right  of  divorce  altogether.  But 
the  woman  has  no  right  of  divorce  at  all,  so  firmly  fixed 
throughout  all  Old  Testament  time  was  the  belief  in  the 


404  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

inferiority  of  women.  On  the  whole,  therefore,  divorce 
in  Israel  remained,  after  the  law  had  dealt  with  it,  much 
on  the  level  to  which  the  tribal  customs  had  brought  it. 
So  far  as  the  legislation  dealt  with  it,  it  tended  to  restric- 
tion ;  but  when  all  is  said  it  remains  true  that  the  Israelite 
law  of  divorce  was  in  the  main  much  what  it  would  have 
been  had  there  been  no  revelation.  But  the  spirit  of  the 
religion  of  Yahweh  was  against  laxity  in  this  matter,  and 
this  more  rigorous  feeling  finds  expression  in  the  evident 
distaste  for  the  remarriage  of  a  divorced  woman  which 
is  expressed  in  Deut.  xxiv.  4.  Remarriage  is  not  for- 
bidden ;  but  the  woman  who  remarries  is  spoken  of  as 
one  who  has  "  let  herself  be  defiled."  No  such  expression 
could  have  been  used,  had  not  remarriage  after  divorce 
been  looked  upon  as  something  which  detracted  from 
perfect  feminine  purity.  The  legislator  evidently  regarded 
it  as  the  higher  way  for  a  divorced  woman  to  remain 
unmarried  so  long  at  least  as  the  divorcing  husband  lived. 
If  she  remained  so,  the  possibility  of  reunion  was  always 
kept  open,  and  the  law  evidently  looked  upon  the  ultimate 
annulment  of  the  divorce  as  the  course  which  was  most 
consonant  with  the  ideal  of  marriage. 

It  is  thus  clearly  seen  how  our  Lord's  statement  (Matt, 
xix.  8) — *'  Moses  because  of  the  hardness  of  your  hearts 
suffered  you  to  put  away  your  wives,  but  from  the 
beginning  it  hath  not  been  so" — is  true. 

And  when  we  leave  the  law  and  come  to  history  and 
prophecy,  we  find  this  view  to  have  been  a  prevalent 
one  from  early  times.  In  one  of  the  earliest  connected 
historical  narratives,  that  of  J  (Gen.  ii.  24),  the  union 
of  husband  and  wife  is  said  to  be  so  peculiarly  intimate 
that  it  makes  them  one  body,  so  that  separation  is  equiva- 
lent to  mutilation.  And  the  prophets  remain  true  to  this 
conception  of  marriage,  as  the  one  which  fitted  best  into 
their  deeper  and  loftier  views  of  morality.     From  Hosea 


LAWS   OF  PURITY  (CHASTITY  AND  MARRIAGE)    405 

onwards  ^  they  represent  the  indissoluble  bond  between 
Yahweh  and  His  people  as  a  marriage  relation,  founded 
on  free  choice  and  unchangeable  love.  The  possibility 
of  divorce  is  no  doubt  often  admitted,  and  the  conduct  of 
Israel  is  represented  as  justifying  that  course.  But  the 
prophetic  message  always  is  that  the  love  of  God  will 
never  permit  Him  to  put  away  His  people ;  and  the  people 
are  often  addressed  as  faithless  and  faint-hearted,  because 
they  yield  to  the  temptation  of  believing  that  He  has 
cast  them  off  (Isa.  1.  i).  Evidently,  therefore,  the  pro- 
phetic ideal  of  marriage  was  that  it  should  be  indissoluble, 
that  it  should  be  founded  upon  free  mutual  love,  and  that 
such  a  love  should  make  it  impossible  for  either  husband 
or  wife  to  give  the  other  up,  however  desperate  the  errors 
of  the  guilty  one  might  have  been. 

Perhaps  the  finest  expression  of  this  view  occurs  in 
Isa.  liv.,  in  the  exhortation  addressed  to  exiled  Israel  and 
beginning  ''Sing,  O  barren,  thou  that  didst  not  bear." 
There  the  ideal  Israel  is  urged  to  lay  aside  all  her  fears 
with  this  assurance :  ''  For  thy  Maker  is  thine  husband ; 
Yahweh  of  Hosts  is  His  name  :  and  thy  Redeemer,  the 
Holy  One  of  Israel,  the  God  of  the  whole  earth  shall  He 
be  called.  For  Yahweh  hath  called  thee  as  a  woman 
forsaken  and  grieved  in  spirit ;  how  can  a  wife  of  youth 
be  rejected?  saith  thy  God."  The  full  meaning  of  this 
last  touching  question  has  been  well  brought  out  by 
Prof.  Cheyne  (Isaiah,  ii.,  p.  55)  :  ''  Even  many  an  earthly 
husband  (how  much  more  then  Yahweh  !)  cannot  bear 
to  see  the  misery  of  his  divorced  wife,  and  therefore  at 
length  recalls  her ;  and  when  his  wife  is  one  who  has  been 
wooed  and  won  in  youth,  how  impossible  is  it  for  her  to 
be  absolutely  dismissed."  The  rising  tide  of  prophetic 
feeling  on  this  subject  culminates  in  the  pathetic  scene 
depicted  by  Malachi,  who  in  chap.  ii.    I2ff.  reprov^es  his 

'  J^Iosea  ii,  19, 


4o6  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

people  for  their  cruel  and  frivolous  use  of  divorce.  Drawn 
away  by  love  of  idolatrous  women,  they  had  divorced 
their  Hebrew  wives ;  and  these  in  their  misery  crowded 
the  Temple,  covering  the  altar  of  Ysfhweh  with  ^'  tears  and 
weeping  and  sobbing,"  till  He  could  endure  it  no  more. 
He  had  been  witness  of  the  covenant  made  between  each 
of  these  men  and  the  wife  of  his  youth ;  yet  they  had 
broken  this  Divinely  sanctioned  bond.  He  therefore  warns 
them  to  take  heed,  ''  for  Yahweh  the  God  of  Israel  saith, 
I  hate  putting  away,  and  him  who  covers  his  garment  with 
violence."  The  Rabbini-c  interpreters,  not  being  minded 
to  give  up  the  privilege  of  divorce,  have  wrested  these 
words  into  ''  for  Yahweh  the  God  of  Israel  saith,  If  he 
hate  her  put  her  away."  But,  so  wrested,  the  words  bring 
down  the  whole  context  in  one  ruin.  They  are  intelligible 
only  if  they  denounce  divorce,  and  in  this  sense  they 
must  undoubtedly  be  taken. 

There  remains  for  consideration,  however,  a  marriage 
which  the  Deuteronomist  permits,  which  seems  to  run 
counter  to  all  the  finer  feelings  and  instincts  of  his  later 
time.  It  is  dealt  with  in  chap.  xxv.  5-10,  and  is  notable 
because  it  is  a  clear  breach  of  the  definite  rule  that  a 
man  should  not  marry  his  deceased  brother's  wife.  But 
it  will  be  obvious  at  once  that  the  permission  of  this 
marriage  stands  upon  quite  a  different  footing  from  the 
prohibition.  It  is  permitted  only  in  a  special  case  for 
definite  ends ;  and  while  the  sanction  of  the  prohibition 
is  the  infliction  of  childlessness  (Lev.  xx.  21),  the  man 
who  refuses  to  enter  upon  marriage  with  his  deceased 
brother's  wife  is  punished  only  by  being  put  to  shame 
by  her  before  the  elders  of  his  city.  We  have  not  here, 
therefore,  a  law  in  the  strict  sense.  It  is  only  a  recognition 
of  a  very  ancient  custom  which  is  not  yet  abolished, 
though  evidently  pubhc  feeling  was  beginning  to  make 
light  of  the  obligation.    Its  place  in  the  twenty-fifth  chapter, 


LAWS  OF  PURITY  (CHASTITY  AND  MARRIAGE)     407 

away  from  the  marriage  laws  (which  are  given  in  xxi.  10  ff., 
xxii.  13  ff.,  and  xxiv.  1-4),  and  among  duties  of  kindness, 
seems  to  hint  this,  and  we  may  consequently  take  the  law 
as  a  concession.  That  the  custom  was  ancient  in  the 
time  of  Deuteronomy  may  be  gathered  from  the  fact  that 
in  Hebrew  there  is  a  special  technical  term,  ytbbem,  for. 
entering  on  such  a  marriage.  The  probability  is,  indeed, 
that  levirate  marriage  was  a  pre-Mosaic  custom  connected 
with  ancestor-worship.  It  certainly  is  practised  by  many 
other  races,  e.g.  the  Hindus  and  Persians,  whose  religions- 
can  be  traced  to  that  source.  Under  that  system,  it  was 
necessary  that  the  male  line  of  descent  should  be  kept 
up  in  order  that  the  ancestral  sacrifices  might  be  continued, 
and  to  bear  the  expense  of  this  the  property  of  the  brother 
dying  childless  was  jealously  preserved.  In  India,  at 
present,  both  purposes  are  served  by  adoption,  either 
by  the  childless  man  or  by  the  widow.  In  earlier  times, 
when  fatherhood  was  to  a  large  extent  a  merely  juridical 
relationship,^  when,  that  is  to  say,  it  was  a  common  thing 
for  a  man  to  accept  as  his  son  any  child  born  of  women 
under  his  control,  whether  he  were  the  father  or  not,  the 
same  end  was  also  attained  by  this  marriage.'^  Originating 
in  this  way,  the  practice  was  carried  over  into  the  Israelite 
social  life  when  it  changed  its  form,  and  the  motives  for 
it  were  then  brought  into  line  with  the  new  and  higher 
religion.  The  motive  of  keeping  alive  the  name  and 
memory  of  the  childless  man  was  substituted  for  that 
of  securing  the  continuance  of  his  worship ;  and  the  pur- 
pose of  securing  the  permanence  of  property,  landed 
property  especially,  in  each  household,  was  substituted 
for  that  of  supplying  means  for  the  sacrifice.     Later,  the 

'   The  Priniitive  Fatnily,  Starcke,  p.  141. 

^  Indeed  in  India  it  was  not  only  the  widow  of  the  childless  man 
who  might  bear  him  a  son  whose  real  father  was  a  near  relation,  but  his 
childless  wife  also. —  Maine,  Early  .Law,  p.  102. 


4o8  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

motive  connected  with  the  transmission  of  property 
possibly  became  the  main  one.  For,  since  the  levirate 
marriage  came  in,  according  to  the  strict  wording  of  our 
passage,  whenever  a  man  died  without  a  son,  whether 
he  had  daughters  or  not,  this  marriage  would  seem  to 
have  been  an  alternative  means  of  keeping  the  property 
in  the  family  to  that  of  letting  the  daughters  inherit.^  But 
the  spirit  of  the  higher  religion,  as  well  as  a  more  advanced 
civilisation,  was  unfavourable  to  it.  The  custom  evidently 
was  withering  when  Deuteronomy  was  written,  though  in 
Judaism  it  was  not  disallowed  till  post-Talmudic  times. 

The  impression,  therefore,  which  the  laws  and  customs 
regulating  the  relations  of  men  and  women  in  Israel  give 
to  the  candid  student  must  be  pronounced  to  be  a 
strangely  mixed  one.  It  would  probably  not  be  too 
much  to  say  that  it  is  at  first  a  deeply  disappointing  one. 
We  have  been  accustomed  to  fill  all  the  Old  Testament 
utterances  on  this  subject  with  the  suffused  fight  of  Gospel 
precept  and  example,  till  Vv^e  have  lost  sight  of  the  lower 
elements  undeniably  present  in  the  Old  Testament  laws 
and  ideas  concerning  purity.  But  that  is  no  longer 
possible.  Whether  of  enmity  or  of  zeal  for  the  truth, 
these  less  worthy  elements  have  been  dragged  forth  into 
the  broad  light  of  day,  and  in  that  light  we  are  called  upon 
to  readjust  our  thoughts  so  as  to  accept  and  account  for 
them.  Evidently  at  the  beginning  the  Israelite  tribes 
accepted  the  uncivifised  idea  of  woman.  On  that  as  a 
basis,  however,  customs  and  laws  regarding  chastity, 
marriage    and   divorce   were  adopted,  which   transcended 

'  That  the  latter  course  may  in  some  cases  have  been  unpopular  with 
the  sonless  man's  nearest  kin  is  clear,  since  under  it  the  inheritance 
must  be  divided,  and  it  might  pass  to  remoter  connections,  though  not 
beyond  the  tribe.  The  nearer  relations  would,  therefore,  probably 
prefer  that  their  brother's  property  should  be  kept  intact  and  be  trans- 
mitted with  his  name,  and  this  ancient  custom,  sanctioned  {ind  modified 
by  Mosaism,  would  give  tjiem  that  choice, 


LAWS   OF  PURITY  (CHASTITY  AND  MARRIAGE)     409 

and  passed  beyond  that  fundamental  idea.  The  moral 
complicity  of  v/oman,  or  her  innocence,  in  cases  where  her 
chastity  had  been  attacked,  came  to  be  taken  into  account. 
Polygamy,  though  never  forbidden,  received  grievous 
vv^ounds  from  prophets  and  others  of  the  sacred  vv^riters  ; 
and  as  marriage  with  one  became  more  and  more  the  ideal, 
the  higher  teachers  of  the  people  kept  the  indissolubleness  of 
marriage  before  the  public  mind,  till  Malachi  denounced 
divorce  in  Yahweh's  name.  In  regard  to  the  bars  to 
marriage  there  was  little  change,  probably,  from  the  days 
of  Moses ;  but  the  old  family  rules  were  reinforced  by  a 
deep  and  delicate  regard  for  even  the  less  palpable 
affections  and  relations  which  grew  up  in  the  home. 

The  final  attainment,  therefore,  was  great  and  worthy 
enough ;  but  the  cruder  and  less  refined  ideas,  which  had 
been  inherited  from  pre-Mosaic  custom,  always  make 
themselves  felt,  and  have  even  dominated  some  of  the  laws. 
They  dominated,  even  more,  the  practice  of  the  people 
and  the  theory  of  the  scribes  ;  so  that  on  the  very  eve  of 
His  coming  who  was  to  proclaim  decisively  the  indis- 
solubility of  marriage,  the  great  Jewish  schools  were 
wrangling  whether  mere  caprice,  or  some  immodesty  only, 
could  justify  divorce.  Nevertheless  the  Decalogue,  with 
its  deep  and  broad  command,  culminating  in  prohibition 
even  of  inward  evil  desire,  had  always  had  its  own 
influence.  The  teachings  of  the  prophets,  which  breathe 
passionate  hatred  of  impurity,  had  taught  all  men  of  good- 
will in  Israel  that  the  wrath  of  God  surely  burned  against 
it.  But  the  stamp  of  imperfection  was  upon  Old  Testa- 
ment teaching  here  as  elsewhere.  Like  the  Messianic  hope, 
like  the  future  of  Israel,  like  all  Israel's  greatest  destinies, 
the  promise  of  a  higher  life  in  this  respect  was  darkened 
by  the  inconsistencies  of  general  practice ;  and  uncer- 
tainty prevailed  as  to  the  direction  in  which  men  were  to 
look  for  the  harmonious  development  of  the  higher  potencies 


4IO  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

which  were  making  their  presence  felt.  It  was  in  them 
rather  than  in  the  law,  in  the  ideals  rather  than  in  the 
practice  of  the  people,  that  the  hidden  power  was  silenlly 
doing  its  regenerating  work.  The  religion  of  Yahweh 
in  its  central  content,  surrounded  all  laws  and  institu- 
tions with  an  atmosphere  which  challenged  and  furthered 
growth  of  every  wholesome  kind.  The  axe  and  hammer 
of  the  legislative  builder  was  rarely  heard  at  work ;  but 
in  the  silence  which  seems  to  some  so  barren,  there 
slowly  grew  a  fabric  of  moral  and  spiritual  ideas  and 
aspirations,  which  needed  only  the  coming  of  Christ  to 
make  it  the  permanent  home  of  all  morally  earnest  souls. 

With  Him  all  that  the  past  generations  ^'had  willed, 
or  hoped,  or  dreamed  of  good  "  came  actually  to  exist. 
He  made  what  had  been  aspiration  only  the  basis  of  an 
actual  Kingdom  of  God.  As  one  of  its  primary  moral 
foundations  He  laid  down  the  radical  indissolubility  of 
marriage,  and  made  visible  to  all  men  the  breadth  of  the 
law  given  in  the  Decalogue  by  forbidding  even  wandering 
desires.  In  doing  this  He  completely  surpassed  all  Old 
Testament  teaching,  and  set  up  a  standard  which  Christian 
communities  as  such  have  held  to  hitherto,  but  which  from 
lack  of  elevation  and  earnestness  they  seem  inclined  in 
these  days  to  let  slip.  That  such  a  standard  was  ever  set 
up  was  the  work  of  a  Divine  revelation  of  a  perfectly  unique 
kind,  working  through  long  ages  of  upward  movement. 
Humanity  has  been  dragged  upwards  to  it  most  unwillingly. 
Men  have  found  difficulty  in  living  at  that  height,  and 
nothing  is  easier  than  to  throw  away  all  the  gain  of  these 
many  centuries.  All  that  is  needed  is  a  plunge  or  two 
downwards.  But  if  ever  these  plunges  are  taken,  the 
long,  slow  effort  upwards  will  only  have  to  be  begun 
again,  if  family  life  is  to  be  firmly  established,  and  purity 
is  to  become  a  permanent  possession  of  men. 


CHAPTER   XXIII 

LAWS     OF    KINDNESS 

WITH  the  commands  we  now  have  to  consider,  we 
leave  altogether  the  region  of  strict  law,  and  enter 
entirely  upon  that  of  aspiration  and  of  feeling.     Kindness, 
by  its  very  nature,  eludes  the  rude  compulsion  of  law, 
properly   so  called.     It   ceases    to  be    kindness    when    it 
loses  spontaneity  and   freedom.     Precept,   therefore,   not 
law,  is  the  utmost  that  any  lawgiver  can  give  in  respect 
to  it ;  and  this  is  precisely  what  we  have  in  Deuteronomy, 
so  far  as  it  endeavours  to  incite  men  to  gentleness,  good- 
ness, and  courtesy  to  one  anothei.      The   author   gives 
his   people  an   ideal  of  what   they  ought  to  be  in  these 
respects,  and  presses  it  home  upon  them  with  the  heart- 
felt earnestness  which  distinguishes   him.      That  is  all ; 
but  yet,  if  we  are  to  do  justice  to  him  as  a  lawgiver,  we 
must   consider   and    estimate   the   moral   value   of  these 
precepts ;  for,  properly  speaking,  they  are  the  flower  of 
his  legal  principles,  and  they  reveal  in  detail,  and  therefore, 
for  the  average  man,  most  impressively,  the  spirit  in  which 
his  whole  legislation  was  conceived.     In  the  abstract  no 
doubt  he  had  told  us  that  love — love  to  Yahweh — was  to 
be  the  fundamental   thing,  and  we  have  seen  how  deep 
and  wide-reaching  that  announcement  was.     But  a  review 
of  the  precepts  which  indicate  how  he  conceived  that  love 
to  God  should  affect  men's  relations  with  men,  will  give 
that  general   principle  a  definiteness  and  a  concreteness 
more    impressive    than   a   thousand    homilies.      For   the 

4U 


412  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

conception  that  a  relation  of  love  is  the  only  fit  relation 
between  man  and  God,  could  not,  if  it  were  sincerely 
taken  up,  fail  to  throw  light  upon  men's  true  relations  to 
each  other.  Consequently  the  great  declaration  of  the 
sixth  chapter  was  bound  to  re-echo  in  the  precepts  to 
guide  conduct,  giving  new  sanctity  and  breadth  to  all 
man's  duty  to  his  fellows. 

Of  course  the  risk  of  great  failure  was  nigh  at  hand  : 
for  men  may  be  intellectually  convinced  that  love  is  the 
element  in  which  life  ought  to  be  lived,  and  may  proclaim 
it,  who  are  far  from  being  actually  penetrated  and  filled 
with  love,  tested  and  increased  by  communion  with  God. 
As  a  result,  much  talk  about  love  and  kindly  human  duty 
has  fallen  with  but  little  impulsive  power  upon  the  hearts 
of  men.  When,  however,  it  is  felt  to  be  the  expression  of 
a  present  experience,  such  exhortation  has  power  to  move 
men  as  no  other  words  can  do.  And  the  author  of 
Deuteronomy  was  one  of  those  who  had  this  divinely 
given  secret.  In  all  parts  of  his  book  you  find  his  words 
becoming  winged  with  power,  wherever  love  to  God  and 
man  is  even  remotely  touched  upon.  If  our  hypothesis 
as  to  the  age  in  which  he  lived  and  wrote  be  correct, 
his  must  have  been  one  of  those  high  and  rare  natures 
which  are  not  embittered  by  persecution  or  contemptuous 
neglect.  Long  before  our  Lord  had  spoken  His  decisive 
words  on  our  duty  to  our  neighbour,  or  St.  Paul  had 
written  his  great  hymn  to  love,  this  man  of  God  had  been 
chosen  to  feel  the  truth,  and  had  suff'used  his  book  with 
it,  so  that  the  only  principle  which  can  be  recognised  as 
binding  together  all  his  precepts  is  the  central  principle  of 
the  New  Testament.  Of  course  that  made  his  ideal  too 
high  for  present  realisation ;  but  he  gained  more  than  he 
lost ;  for,  from  Jeremiah  and  Josiah  downwards  through 
the  years,  all  the  noblest  of  his  people  responded  to  him. 
The  splendour  of  his  thought  cast  reflections  upon  their 


LAIVS   OF  KINDNESS  413 

minds,  and  these  glowed  and  shone  amid  the  meaner 
lights  which  Pharisaism  kindled  and  cherished,  till  He 
came  whose  right  it  was  to  reign.  Then  Deuteronomy's 
true  rank  was  seen  ;  for  from  it  Christ  took  the  answers 
by  which  He  repelled  Satan  in  the  temptation,  and  from 
it,  too.  He  took  that  commandment  which  He  called  the 
first  and  greatest.  Of  course  the  humanity  of  the  book 
had  not,  in  expression  at  least,  the  imperial  sweep  of 
Christian  brotherhood  which  makes  all  men  equal,  so  that 
for  it  there  is  neither  Jew  nor  Gentile,  neither  wise  nor 
unwise,  neither  male  nor  female,  neither  bond  nor  free. 
But  all  the  chosen  people  are  included  in  its  sympathy ; 
and  in  this  field,  without  undue  interference  with  private 
life,  the  author  sets  forth  by  specimen  cases  how  the 
fraternal  feeling  should  manifest  itself  in  loving,  neigh- 
bourly kindness. 

As  these  laws  or  precepts  of  kindness  are  not  systemati- 
cally arranged,  it  will  be  necessary  to  group  them,  and  we 
shall  take  first  those  in  which  it  is  prescribed  that  injury 
to  others  should  be  avoided.  Of  course  criminal  wrongs 
are  not  dealt  with  here.  They  have  already  been  for- 
bidden in  the  strictly  legal  portions  of  the  book,  and 
penalties  have  been  attached  to  them.  But  in  the  region 
beyond  law,  there  are  many  acts  in  which  the  difference 
between  a  good,  and  kindly,  and  sympathetic  man,  and  a 
morose,  and  sullen,  and  unkindly  one,  can  be  even  more 
clearly  seen.  In  that  region  Deuteronomy  is  unmistak- 
ably on  the  side  of  sympathy.  The  poor,  the  slave,  the 
helpless  should,  it  teaches,  be  objects  of  special  care  to 
the  true  son  of  Israel.  They  should  be  treated,  it  shows, 
with  a  generous  perception  of  the  peculiar  difficulties  of 
their  lot ;  and  pressure  upon  them  at  these  special  points 
where  their  lot  is  hard  should  be  abhorrent  to  every 
Israelite. 

The  first  in  order  of  the  precepts  which  we  are  con- 


414  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


sidering  (chap.  xxii.  v.  8) — ^'When  thou  buildest  a  new 
house,  then  thou  shalt  make  a  raihng  for  thy  roof,   that 
thou  bring  not  blood  upon  thine  house,   if  any  man  fall 
from    thence" — reveals   the   fatherly  and    loving    temper 
which  it  is  the  author's  delight  to  attribute  to  Yahweh. 
As  earthly  parents    guard  their    children  from    accidents 
and  dangers,  so  Yahweh  thinks  of  possible  danger  to  the 
lives  of  His  people,  and  calls  for  even  minute  precautions. 
The  habit  of  sitting  and  sleeping  upon  the  flat  roofs  of 
the  houses  has  always  been,  and  is  now,  prevalent  in  the 
East.     Many  accidents  take  place  through  this  habit.     In 
recent  years  Emin  Pasha,  who  ruled  so  long  at  Wadelai, 
nearly  lost  his  life  by  one ;  and  here  the  house-owner  is 
required  in  Yahweh's  name  to  minimise  that  danger,  ''  that 
he  bring  not  blood   upon   his  house."     The  life  of  each 
one  of  Yahweh's  people  is  precious  to  Him  ;  therefore  it 
is  that  He  will  have  them  to  guard  one  another.     This  is 
the  principle  which  runs  through  all  these  precepts.     In 
the  sphere  of  ritual  and  religion  the  Deuteronomist  does 
not  transcend  Old  Testament  conditions.     For  him  as  for 
others  it  is  the  nation  which  is  the  unit.     But  in  the  region 
now  before  us  he  virtually  goes  beyond  that  limitation,  and 
emphasises  the  care  of  Yahweh  for  the  individual,  just  as  in 
the  demand  for  love  to  God  he  had  already  made  Israel's 
relation  to   their  God  depend  upon  each  man's  personal 
attitude.     The  thought  that  the  Divine  care  was  exerted 
over  even  "  such  a  set  of  paltry  ill-given  animalcules  as 
himself  and  his  nation  were,"  according  to  Carlyle's  phrase, 
does  not  stagger  him  as  it  staggered  Frederick  the  Great. 

In  matters  like  these,  the  unsophisticated  religion  of 
the  Old  Testament  is  most  helpful  to  us  to-day.  We 
have  analysed,  and  refined,  and  dimmed  all  things  into 
abstractions,  God  and  man  among  the  rest.  The  fearless 
simplicity  of  the  Old  Testament  restores  us  to  ourselves, 
and  pours  fresh  blood  into  the  veins  of  our  religion.     No 


LAWS   OF  KINDNESS  4^5 


faith  in  God  as  the  Hving  orderer  of  all  the  circumstances 
of  our  lives  can  be  too  strong  or  too  detailed.  The 
stronger  and  more  definite  it  becomes,  the  nearer  will  it 
approach  the  truth.  Only  one  danger  can  threaten  us 
on  that  line,  the  danger  of  taking  all  our  own  plans  and 
desires  for  the  Divinely  appointed  path  for  us.  But  most 
men  will  by  natural  humility  be  saved  from  that  presump- 
tion ;  and  the  glad  assurance  that  they  are  wrapped  about 
with  the  love  of  God  is  perhaps  the  greatest  need  of  God's 
people  in  their  many  sceptical  and  unspiritual  hours. 

We  cannot,  therefore,  be  surprised  that,  in  connection 
with  debts  and  pledges  for  payment,  the  same  kindness  in 
the  Divine  commands  should  be  observable.  As  usury 
was  forbidden  in  Israel,  and  precautions  against  excessive 
indebtedness  were  exceedingly  elaborate,  the  possibilities 
of  oppression  in  connection  with  debt  in  Israel  were  much 
more  limited  than  in  most  ancient  communities.  Never- 
theless there  was  here  a  region  of  life  in  which  great 
wrongs  could  still  be  done  by  a  harsh  and  unscrupulous 
creditor.  In  order  that  the  creditor  might]  have  some 
security  for  what  he  had  lent,  it  was  permitted  to  receive 
and  give  pledges.  The  precepts  regarding  these  are  con- 
tained in  chap,  xxiv.,  vv.  6,  lO  ff.  and  17,  and  express  a 
considerate  brotherly  spirit,  for  which  it  would  be  hard 
to  find  a  parallel  either  in  ancient  or  modern  times.  The 
creditor  who  has  taken  a  poor  man's  upper  garment  as 
a  pledge  is  commanded,  both  in  the  Book  of  the  Covenant 
and  in  Deuteronomy,  to  restore  the  garment  to  its  owner 
in  the  evening,  that  he  may  sleep  in  it.  In  Palestine  for 
much  of  the  year  the  nights  are  cold  enough,  and  the 
poor  man  has  no  covering  save  his  ordinary  clothes. 
To  deprive  him  of  these,  therefore,  is  to  inflict  punish- 
ment upon  him,  whereas  all  that  should  be  aimed  at  is 
the  creditor's  security.  This  was  peculiarly  offensive  to 
Israelite  feeling,  as  we  see  from  the  mention  in  Amos  ii*  8 


41 6  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

of  the  breach  of  this  prescription  as  one  of  the  sins  for 
which  Yahweh  would  not  turn  away  Israel's  punishment. 
Further,  in  no  case  was  a  widow's  garment  to  be  taken 
in  pledge,  nor  the  handmill  used  for  preparing  the  daily 
flour,  for  that  is  taking  ''  life  "  in  pledge,  as  the 
Deuteronomist  says  with  the  feeling  for  the  conditions  of 
the  poor  man's  life  which  he  always  shows. 

But  the  crown  of  all  this  kindness  is  found  in  the 
beautiful  tenth  verse  :  "  When  thou  dost  lend  thy  neighbour 
any  manner  of  loan,  thou  shalt  not  go  into  his  house  to 
fetch  his  pledge  thou  shalt  stand  without,  and  the  man  to 
whom  thou  dost  lend  shall  bring  forth  the  pledge  without 
unto  thee."  Not  only  does  Yahweh  care  for  external  and 
physical  pain.  He  sympathises  with  those  deeper  wrongs 
and  pains  which  may  hurt  a  man's  feelings.  If  a  pledge 
to  satisfy  the  lender  had  to  be  given,  scruples  of  delicacy  on 
the  part  of  the  borrower  would  appear  to  the  "  practical " 
man,  as  he  would  call  himself,  contemptibly  misplaced. 
If  the  man's  feelings  were  so  very  superfine,  why  did  he 
borrow  ?  But  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  knew  the  heart 
of  God  better.  With  the  fine  tact  of  a  man  of  God,  he 
knew  how  even  the  well-meaning  rich  man's  amused 
contempt  for  the  poor  man's  few  household  treasures, 
would  cut  like  a  whip,  and  he  knew  that  Yahweh,  who 
was  "  very  pitiful  and  of  tender  mercy,"  would  desire  no 
son  of  Israel  to  be  exposed  to  it.  He  knew,  too,  how 
human  greed  might  dispose  the  lender  to  seize  upon  the 
thing  of  greatest  value  in  the  poor  house,  whether  its 
price  was  in  excess  of  the  loan  or  not.  Finally,  he  knew 
how  it  deteriorates  the  poor  to  be  dealt  with  in  an  un- 
ceremonious, tactless  way  even  by  the  benevolent.  And 
in  the  name  and  with  the  authority  of  God  he  forbids  it. 
The  poor  man's  home,  the  home  of  the  man  whom  we 
desire  to  help  especially,  is  to  be  sacred.  In  our  dealing 
with  him  of  all  men  the  finest  courtesy  is  to  be  brought 


LAIVS   OF  KINDNESS  417 

into  play.  Just  because  he  needs  our  help,  we  are  to 
stand  on  points  of  ceremony  with  him,  which  we  might 
dispense  with  in  dealing  with  friends  and  equals.  "  Thou 
shalt  stand  without,"  unless  he  asks  thee  to  enter;  and 
thou  shalt  show  thereby,  in  a  deeper  way  than  any  gifts 
or  loans  can  show,  that  the  fraternal  tie  is  acknowledged 
and  reverenced. 

In  two  other  precepts  the  same  delicate  regard  for  the 
finer  feelings  finds   expression.     In  the   fifth  verse   it  is 
commanded  that  "  When  a  man  taketh  a  new  wife,  he  shall 
not  go  out  in  the  host,  neither  shall  he  be  charged  with 
any  business :  he  shall  be  free  at  home  one  year,  and  shall 
cheer  his  wife  that  he  hath  taken."     The  strangeness  and 
loneliness   which  everywhere  make  themselves  felt   as  a 
formidable  drawback  to  a  young  wife's  joy,  and  which  in 
a  polygamous  family,  where  jealousies  are   bitter,   must 
often    have   reached  the   point    of  being    intolerable,  are 
provided  for.     In  chap.  xxv.    1-3  again,  which  deals  with 
the  punishment  of  criminals  by  beating,  it  is  provided  that  in 
no  case  shall  the  number  of  blows  exceed  forty,  and  that 
they  shall  be  given  in  the  presence  of  the  judge.     This  in 
itself  was  a  measure  of  humanity,  but  the  reason  given  for 
the  direction  is  greatly  more  humane.     ''  Forty  stripes  he 
may  give  him,"  says  ver.  3  ;  "he  shall  not  exceed  ;  lest,  if 
he  should  exceed,  and  beat  him  above  these  with  many 
stripes,   then  thy   brother  should   seem   vile   unto    thee." 
Even  in  the  case  of  the  criminal  care  is  to  be  taken  that 
he    be  not    made   an    object   of   contempt.      Punishment 
has  gone  beyond  its  true  aim  when  it  makes  a  man  seem 
vile  unto  his  neighbours  by  attacking  his  dignity  as  a  man  ; 
for  that  should  be  inalienable  even  in  a  criminal.     A  man 
may    have    all  his    material    wants  satisfied,   and  yet    be 
sorely  vexed  and  injured.     God   sympathises  with  these 
hurts  of  the  soul,  and  defends  His  people  against  them. 
After  the  lovingkindness  of  these  commands,  it  seems 

27 


4i8  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

almost   needless  to  say  that  the    smaller   social   wrongs 
which  men  may  inflict  upon  each  other  are  sternly  for- 
bidden.    Often,  the  rich  from  want  of  thought  about  the 
life  of  the  poor  carelessly  do  them  wrong.     Such  a  case  is 
that  dealt   within   chap.   xxiv.    14  f.  :     ''  Thou  shalt    not 
oppress  an  hired  servant  that  is  poor  and  needy,  whether 
he  be  of  thy  brethren,  or  of  thy  strangers  {gerim)  that 
are  in  thy  land  within  thy  gates  :  in  his  day  thou  shalt 
give  him  his  hire,  neither  shall  the  sun  go  down  upon  it ; 
for  he  is  poor,  and  setteth  his  heart  upon  it :  lest  he  cry 
against    thee    unto    Yahweh,    and    it   be   sin  unto    thee." 
The    same    command   is   given    in    Lev.    xix.     13,    and 
Dillmann  is  probably  right  in  regarding  this  as  a  Deuter- 
onomic  repetition  of  that,   since   there  the  precept  forms 
part  of  a  pentade  of  commands  dealing  with  similar  things, 
while  here  it  stands  alone.     From  early  times,  therefore, 
Yahweh  had  revealed  Himself  as  considering  the  poor  and 
the  necessities  of  their  position.     Further,  the  poor  man 
or  the  wayfarer  was  permitted    to  satisfy  his  hunger  by 
taking  fruit  or  grain  in  his  hands  as  he  passed  through 
the  fields.     No  one  was  to  die  of  starvation  if  the  fields 
were  "yielding  meat."     Last  of  all,  estrangement  between 
brethren,  i.e.  all  Israelites,  was  not  to  free  them  from  duties 
of  neighbourly  love.     If  a  man  find  a  stray  ox  or  sheep  or 
ass,  or  a  garment  or  any  other  lost  thing,  he  is  not  to 
leave  it  where  he  finds  it.      He  is  to  restore   it  to  the 
owner ;  and  if  the  owner  is  unknown  or  too  far  off,  the 
finder  is  to  keep  that  which  he  has  found  till  it  is  inquired 
after.     Then  if  he  see  his  brother's,  i,e.  his  neighbour's,  ass 
or  ox  fallen  by  the  way,  he  must  not  pass  by,  but  must 
help  the    owner   to    set   it  on   its   feet   again.     That   an 
estranged  **  brother  "  was  especially  in  view  is  shown  by 
the   fact   that   in    the    parallel   passage    (Exod.    xxiii.   4) 
^^  thine  enemy's  ox "  and    "  the    ass    of  him    that    hateth 
thee  "  are  mentioned. 


LAIVS   OF  KINDNESS  419 

Now,  we  have  called  these  precepts  and  provisions  the 
flower  and  blossom  of  the  Deuteronomic  legislation, 
because  they  reveal  in  their  greatest  perfection  that 
sympathy  with  the  commonest  and  the  innermost  cares 
of  men  which  is  the  moving  impulse  of  it  all.  But  they 
reveal  more  than  that.  They  show  that  already  in  those 
far-off  days  the  secret  of  God's  love  to  man  had  been 
made  known.  Its  universality  so  far  as  Israel  was 
concerned,  its  penetrative  sympathy,  its  quality  of  regarding 
no  human  interest  as  outside  its  scope,  its  superhuman 
impartiality — all  are  here.  They  are  not  of  course  present 
in  their  full  sweep  and  power,  as  Christ  made  them  known. 
Outside  of  Israel  there  were  the  Gentiles,  who  had  a  share 
only  in  the  "  uncovenanted  mercies "  of  God ;  and  even 
among  the  chosen  people  there  were  the  slaves  and  the 
strangers,  who  had  a  comparatively  insecure  relation  to 
Him.  Further,  the  thought  of  the  self-sacrifice  of  God, 
though  soon  to  have  its  dawning  in  the  later  chapters  of 
Isaiah,  v/as  not  as  yet  an  appreciable  element  in  the 
Israelite  theology.  Nevertheless  the  passages  we  have 
been  considering  throw  a  light  upon  social  duty,  as  seen 
by  this  inspired  servant  of  God,  which  puts  to  shame  the 
state  of  the  Christian  mind  on  these  subjects  even  now. 

The  great  principles  underlying  right  relations  between 
men  of  different  social  status  are,  according  to  these 
precepts,  courtesy  and  consideration.  Now  it  is  precisely 
the  want  of  these  which  lies  at  the  root  of  the  bitterness 
which  is  so  alarming  a  symptom  of  our  social  state  at 
present.  There  is  not,  we  are  willing  to  believe,  much  of 
intentional,  deliberate  oppression  exercised  by  the  strong 
upon  the  weak.  The  injustice  that  is  done  is  probably 
inherent  in  the  present  social  system,  for  the  character  of 
which  no  one  living  is  responsible.  But  one  reason  why 
reform  comes  so  slowly,  and  why  patience  till  it  can  come 
dies  out  among  the  masses  of  men,  is  that  the  employing 


420  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

classes,  and  those  who  have  inherited  privileges,  often 
convey  to  those  they  employ  the  impression  that  they  are 
beyond  the  pale  of  the  courtesies  which  are  recognised  as 
binding  between  men  of  the  same  class.  Often  without 
intending  it,  their  manner  when  they  are  approached  by 
those  they  employ,  their  short  and  half-aggrieved  replies, 
reveal  to  the  latter  that  they  are  regarded  much  more  as 
parts  of  the  machinery,  than  as  men  who  might  naturally 
be  expected  to  claim,  and  who  have  a  right  to,  the 
recognition  of  their  rights  as  men. 

Of  course  there  are  excuses.  There  is  the  long  tradition 
of  subordination  to  arbitrary  power,  from  which  none 
in  earlier  ages  of  the  world  have  been  free.  There  is 
the  impatience  with  which  a  governing  and  organising 
mind  listens  to  grievances  which  it  sees  either  to  be 
inevitable  under  the  circumstances,  or  to  be  compensated 
by  some  corresponding  privilege,  which  stands  or  falls 
with  the  thing  complained  of  And  then  there  is  the 
absence  of  outlook,  which  is  the  foible  of  the  directing 
mind.  It  is  set  to  rule  and  make  successful  a  large  and 
intricate  business  under  given  circumstances.  The  more 
effective  such  a  mind  is  for  practical  purposes,  the  more 
thoroughly  will  it  limit  itself  to  working  out  the  problem 
committed  to  it.  When  grievances  have  to  be  dealt  with 
which  have  their  root  in  the  present  circumstances,  and 
which  imply  changes  more  or  less  radical  in  his  fixed 
point  if  they  are  to  be  redressed,  it  is  hard  for  the 
employer  to  persuade  himself  that  his  employees  are  not 
merely  crying  for  the  moon.  If  he  think  so,  he  will 
probably  say  so  ;  and  working  men  go  away  from  such 
interviews  with  the  feeling  that  it  is  vain  to  expect  from 
employers  any  sympathy  for  their  aspirations  towards  a 
better  social  state,  which  yet  they  cannot  give  up  without 
a  slur  upon  their  manhood. 

But  though  these  are  excuses  for  the  attitude  we  have 


LAIVS   OF  KINDNESS  421 

been   describing,  there  can  be  no  question  that  the  fine 
and  delicate  courtesy  which    Deuteronomy  prescribes  is 
indispensable  in  order  to  avert  class  hostility.     Courtesy 
cannot,  of  course,  change  our  social  state,  and  where  if 
works  badly  evils  that  produce  friction  will  remain.     But 
the  first  condition  of  a  successful  solution  of  our  difficulties 
is,  that  evil  tempers  should  as  far  as  possible  be  banished, 
and  for  that  purpose  courtesy  even  under  provocation  is 
the  one  sovereign  remedy.     For  it  means  that  you  convey 
to  your  neighbour  that  you  consider  him  in  all  essentials 
your  equal.     It  means,  too,  that  you  are  willing  to  recog- 
nise his  rights  and  to  respect  them.     Though  power  may 
be  on  your  side,  and  weakness  on  his,  that  will  only  make 
it  more  incumbent  upon  you  to  show  that  mere  external 
circumstances  cannot  impair  your  reverence    for  him  as 
man.     If  that  be  sincerely  felt,  it  opens  a  way,  otherwise 
absolutely  closed,  to  mutual  confidence  and  mutual  under- 
standing.    These  once  established,  light  on  all  parts  of 
the  social  problem  (which,  be  it  remembered,  employers 
and  employed  must  solve  together  if  it  is  to  be    solved 
at  all)  will  break  in  upon  the  minds  of  both  classes.     In 
spite    of  the   diversity  of  their  immediate   interests,    the 
ultimate  interest  of  all  is    the    same.       If  contempt    and 
suspicion  were  excluded,  eyes  which  are  now  holden  would 
be  opened,  and  a  common  effort  to  reach  a  social  state 
in  which  all  men  shall  have  the  opportunity  of  living  lives 
worthy  of  men  would  become  possible.     If  all  would  learn 
to  treat   those  of  other  classes  with  the  courtesy  which 
they  constantly  show  to  those  of  their  own,  a  great  step 
in  the  right  direction  would   be    taken.       Men    overlook 
much    and    forgive    much    to    their    fellows    when    these 
recognise  their  equality,  and  show  that  they  attach  import- 
ance to  having  good  relations  with  them. 

But  much  more  is   to   be  aimed   at  than   that.      The 
esteem  for  man  as  rrjan  has  great  conquests  yet  to  raake 


422  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

before  even  the  Deuteronomic  courtesy  becomes  common. 
But  if  these  nobler  manners  are  to  come  in,  then  the 
motives  suggested  by  Deuteronomy  will  have  to  be  made 
effective  for  our  day.  What  these  were  it  is  not  difficult 
to  see.  They  all  had  their  source  in  the  author's  own 
relations  and  the  relations  of  his  people  to  God.  Each 
of  his  brethren  of  the  chosen  people  was  a  friend  of 
Yahweh.  There  was  no  difference  between  Israelite  men 
before  Him.  He  had  brought  them  all,  the  poor  and  the 
weak,  as  v/ell  as  the  rich  and  the  strong,  out  of  the 
house  of  bondage ;  He  had  guided  them  all  through 
the  wilderness,  and  had  appointed  each  household  a  place 
in  His  land  where  full  communion  with  Him  was  to 
be  had.  He  had  thought  many  thoughts  about  them, 
had  given  them  lavv^s  and  statutes  dictated  by  loving  in- 
sight, so  as  to  fill  their  life  with  the  consciousness  that 
Yahweh  loved  them,  condescended  to  them,  and  even 
allowed  Himself  to  be  made  to  serve  by  their  sins. 
Whatever  else  they  might  be,  they  were  friends  of  God, 
and  had  a  right  to  respect  on  that  ground.  And  for  us 
who  are  Christians  all  these  motives  have  b^en  intensi- 
fied and  raised  to  a  higher  power.  It  is  not  lawful  for 
us  to  call  any  man  common  or  unclean.  It  is  not  lawful 
to  overwhelm  and  bear  down  the  minds  of  others  by 
sheer  energy  and  power.  Those  ''  for  whom  Christ  died  " 
are  not  to  be  dealt  with  save  on  the  worthy  plane  of 
moral  and  spiritual  conviction.  That  is  the  law  of  Christ ; 
and  so  long  as  it  is  broken  in  our  labour  troubles  by  con- 
temptuous refusal  of  conference  when  it  can  be  granted 
without  compromising  principle,  or  by  slighting  references 
to  labour  leaders  and  a  refusal  to  meet  them,  when 
leaders  of  another  class  would  be  courteously  met,  so 
long  will  the  bitterness  which  inevitably  springs  up 
trouble  us. 

It  is  not,  however,  to  be  supposed  that  only  the  rich  can 


LAPFS   OF  KINDNESS  423 

sin  in  this  respect.  The  labour  organisations  are  be- 
coming in  many  places,  the  stronger/  and  so  far  they 
have  learned  the  law  of  courtesy  no  better  than  their 
opponents.  Opprobrious  epithets  and  injurious  suspicions 
and  accusations  are  the  stock-in-trade  of  some  who  lead 
the  labour  cause.  That  is  as  unworthy  in  them  as  it 
would  be  in  others ;  it  is  not  only  a  crime,  but  a  blunder. 
But  the  practice  of  courtesy  does  not  end  with  itself. 
It  opens  the  way  for  that  consideration  of  the  circum- 
stances of  the  poor  which  we  have  found  so  conspicuous 
in  Deuteronomy.  As  we  have  seen,  Yahweh's  precepts 
contemplate  with  the  nicest  care  the  unavoidable  neces- 
sities of  the  poor  man's  life.  So  He  stirs  us  to  endeavour 
to  realise  the  conditions  of  our  poorer  brethren,  and  by 
doing  so  to  avoid  the  blunders  which  well-meaning 
people  make  by  assuming  that  the  conditions  of  their  own 
life  are  the  norm.  There  are  vast  varieties  of  circumstance 
in  the  world  ;  and  from  lack  of  consideration  those  more 
favourably  situated  excite  envies  and  hatreds  the  bitterness 
of  which  they  cannot  conceive,  by  simply  taking  it  for 
granted  that  every  one  has  the  same  opportunities  for 
recreation,  the  same  possibilities  of  rest.  To  realise  clearly 
what  Mfe  and  death  mean  to  the  toiling  millions  of  men ; 
to  see  that  matters  which  are  small  to  those  who  live  the 
materially  larger  and  freer  life  of  the  class  above  them  are 
of  vital  moment  to  the  poor  ;  to  consider  and  allow  for  all 
such  things  in  their  dealings  with  them, — this  is  the 
teaching  of  Deuteronomy.  Hence  the  command  to  pay 
the  labourer  his  wages  in  the  same  day.  The  heart  of 
man  responds  when  this  note  is  struck.  In  nothing  is  the 
story  of  Gautama  the  Buddha  more  true  to  the  best  in- 
stincts of  humanity  than  in  this,  that  it  represents  him  as 
making  his  great  renunciation  through  coming  into  intimate 

*  Especially  in  some  of  the  Southern  Colonies  in  one  of  which  thj§ 
exposition  is  writtep.. 


424  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

contact  with  the  pain  and  misery  of  ordinary  life.-^  That 
gave  him  insight,  and  insight  wrought  sympathy,  and 
sympathy  transformed  him  from  being  a  petty  prince  of 
Northern  India  into  the  consoler  and  helper  of  millions 
in  all  Eastern  lands.  Even  hopeless  pessimism,  when 
born  of  sympathy,  has  an  immense  consoling  power. 
Much  more  should  the  inextinguishable  hope  given  by 
Christ,  combined  as  it  is  with  the  same  sympathetic 
insight,  console  men  and  uplift  them. 

But  the  sixteenth  verse  of  chap,  xxiii.  reminds  us  that  in 
that  ancient  Deuteronomic  world  there  were  sad  limitations 
to  these  lofty  sympathies  and  hopes.    If  intensively  Deuter- 
onomy almost  reaches  the  Gospel,  extensively  it  shows  the 
whole  difference  between  Judaism  at  its  best  and  Chris- 
tianity.    Below  the  world  of  free-born  members  of  the 
Israelite  community,  to  whom  the  precepts  we  have  hitherto 
been  considering  alone  apply,  there  was  the  class  of  slaves, 
who  in  many  respects  lay  beyond  the  region  of  the  finer 
charities.     The  origin  of  slavery  we  need  not  discuss.     It 
was  a  quite  universal  feature  in  all  ancient  communities, 
and  was  doubtless  a  step  upwards   from  the  custom  of 
destroying    all    prisoners    taken   in    war.      Among    the 
Hebrews  it  had  always  been  customary ;  but  in  historic 
times  it  was  not  among  them  the  all-important  matter  it  was 
in  Greek  and  Roman  polity.     Had  it  been  so,   it  would 
have  been  impossible  to  discuss   the  economic  ideals  of 
Israel  without  taking  this  social  feature  into  consideration 
first.     But  slaves  were  comparatively  few  in  Israel,  and 
the  slave  trade  can  never  have  been  extensive,  since  no 
slave    markets    are   mentioned    in    the    Old   Testament. 
Moreover  the  social  state  of  the  country  made  owners  of 
slaves  share  in  the  slaves'  work,  and  that  of  itself  pre- 
vented the  growth  of  the  worst  abuses.     But  the  most 

'  Btt(f(f/iisw,  by  T,  W,  Rhys  Davids,  p,  29, 


LAJVS   OF  KINDNESS  425 

powerful  element  in  making  the  lot  of  the  slave  tolerable 
was  undoubtedly  the  just  and  pitiful  character  of  the 
Israelite  religion. 

The    fundamental    position    with    regard    to    him    was, 
however,  the  common  one  :    he  was  the  property  of  his 
master.      He    could   be    sold,   pledged,   given  away  as  a 
present,     and    inherited,    and    could    even    be    sold    to 
foreigners.     But  a  female  slave,  if  taken  as  a  subordinate 
wife,  could  not  be   sold,  but  only  freed    if  she  ceased  to 
occupy  that  position.     Exclusive  of  the  Canaanites,  subject 
to  forced  labour,  and  the  Nethinim,  the  servants  of  the 
Sanctuary,  who   occupied  much   the  same   place  as    the 
servi  publici  in  Rome,  there  were  two  classes  of  slaves, 
non-Israelites    and    Israelites.       The    ways   in    which    a 
non-Israelite  slave  could  come   into  Israelite  hands  were 
just  what  they  were  elsewhere.     They  might  be  prisoners 
of  war,  they  might  be  purchased  from  travelling  merchants, 
they  might  voluntarily  have  sold  themselves  from  poverty 
in    a   strange    land,   or   might    have    been    sold  for  debt, 
and  finally  they  might  be  children  born  of  slaves.     Their 
lot  was  of  course  the  hardest.     Yet  even  they  were  not 
so    entirely    unprotected    by    the     law    as     slaves    were 
among  Greeks  and  Romans.     They  were    recognised  as 
men,   having  certain  general  human  rights.     The  master 
had  no  right  to  kill ;  and  if  he  maimed  his  slave  he  had 
to  give  him  his  freedom,  according  to  the  oldest  law  (Exod. 
xvi.  20  f.).     The  law  regarding  the  killing  of  a  slave  has 
often    been    quoted    as    singularly    harsh,    especially  that 
clause  which  says  that  if  a  slave  when  fatally  smitten  lives 
for   some    days   after   the    blow,    his   death    shall  not   be 
avenged,   "  for  he  is  his  (the  master's)  money."      But  it 
ought,  notwithstanding  the  harshness  of  the  expression, 
to  be  judged  quite  otherwise.     The  fact   that  death  was 
not  immediate  was  taken  to  indicate  that  death  was  not 
intended,   and   consequently  the   loss   of  the   slave   was 


426  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

thought  a  sufficient  punishment.  But  the  prohibition  of 
the  dehberate  murder  of  a  slave  was  a  humane  provision 
which  could  not  be  paralleled  in  the  Graeco-Roman  world. 
Moreover  these  laws  would  not  seem  to  have  been  widely 
called  into  action.  The  humane  spirit  became  so  general 
in  Israel  that  slaves  were  generally  well  treated.  In 
Prov.  xxix.  21  over-indulgence  to  a  slave  is  deprecated, 
as  if  it  were  a  common  error ;  and  during  the  whole 
history  there  is  no  mention  of  evils  resulting  from  cruel 
treatment  of  slaves,  much  less  any  record  of  servile  in- 
surrection. Nor  is  there  very  frequent  mention  even  of 
runaway  slaves.  On  the  other  hand,  we  read  of  slaves 
who  were  stewards  of  their  masters'  houses ;  others 
probably  were  entrusted  with  the  charge  of  the  education 
of  children. 

In  Deuteronomy  we  find,  as  we  should  expect,  that  the 
movement  towards  humanity  in  dealing  with  slaves  is 
greatly  furthered.  In  chap.  xxi.  lofif.  the  hardship  of 
a  woman's  lot  when  she  was  taken  captive  in  war  is 
mitigated  with  sympathetic  insight.  To  modern  women  of 
the  Western  world  the  lot  of  such  an  one  seems  so  dreadful 
that  no  mitigation  of  it  can  make  any  difference.  The 
current  teaching  among  even  religious  men  is  that  rather 
than  submit  to  it  a  woman  is  justified  in  suicide.  But 
in  antiquity  the  personality  of  woman  was  undeveloped, 
the  chances  of  life  constantly  passed  her  from  one  master 
to  another,  and  things  intolerable  now  were  tolerable  then. 
Making  even  these  allowances,  however,  if  we  look  at 
the  law  of  the  Old  Testament  as  being  in  all  its  provisions 
and  ab  initio  Divine,  it  seems  impossible  to  praise  it.  A 
law  which  graciously  permitted  a  captive  woman  to 
mourn  for  her  people  for  a  month,  and  only  then  allowed 
her  captor  to  marry  her,  but  if  he  wished  afterwards  to 
get  rid  of  her  provided  that  he  should  not  sell  her,  but 
should  let  her  go  whither  she  would,  cannot  be  said  to  be 


LAWS   OF  KINDNESS  427 

in  itself  compassionate.  But,  if  the  customary  law  of  the 
Israelite  tribes,  restrained  and  purified  by  the  higher 
spirit^  be  regarded  as  the  basis  of  Old  Testament  legis- 
lation, then  the  leaven  of  religion  and  humanity  can  be 
seen  working  nobly,  and  in  a  manner  worthy  of  revelation, 
even  in  such  cases  as  these.  Long  after  the  Christian 
era  we  see  what  the  ordinary  fate  of  a  captive  woman 
was,  in  the  conduct  of  Khalid  the  "  sword  of  the  Lord," 
one  of  the  first  great  Mohammedan  soldiers.  When  he 
had  captured  Malik  ibn  Noweira,  who  had  resisted  Islam, 
along  with  his  wife,  he  gave  orders  which  led  to  Malik's 
death,  and  the  same  night  he  married  his  widow.^  Shortly 
afterwards,  at  the  battle  of  Yemama,  he  demanded  the 
daughter  of  his  captive  Mojda,  and  married  her,  as  the 
Caliph  wrote  in  reproof,  ''  whilst  the  ground  beneath  the 
nuptial  couch  was  yet  moistened  with  the  blood  of  twelve 
hundred."  Horrors  like  these  Deuteronomy  forbids.  The 
frenzied  moments  of  a  captive's  first  grief  are  respected, 
and  some  tenderness  is  shown  to  woman  in  a  world  where 
her  lot  at  its  best  had  always  in  it  possibihties  which 
cannot  now  be  even  thought  of  with  equanimity.  The 
same  steady  pressure  to  a  nobler  form  of  life  is  likewise 
seen  in  the  Deuteronomic  law  dealing  with  the  case  of 
a  foreign  slave  who  had  taken  refuge  in  Israel  (Deut. 
xxiii.  15  f.).  In  the  words,  "  Thou  shalt  not  deliver  unto 
his  master  the  slave  which  is  escaped  from  his  master 
unto  thee  ;  he  shall  dv/ell  with  thee,  in  the  midst  of  thee, 
in  the  place  which  he  shall  choose  within  one  of  thy 
gates,  where  it  liketh  him  best ;  thou  shalt  not  oppress 
him,"  we  have,  thus  early,  the  same  legislation  which  it  is 
the  peculiar  boast  of  England  to  have  introduced  into  the 
modern  world.  ''  Slaves  cannot  breathe  in  England,"  and 
the  moment  they  touch   British   soil  in    any  part  of  the 


Sir  W,  Muir,  Caliphate,  pp.  26  and  33, 


428  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

world  they  are  free.  This  was  the  case  with  the  land  of 
Israel  according  to  the  Deuteronomic  conception  of  what 
it  ought  to  be. 

But  the  highest  points  of  privilege  come  to  the  non- 
Israelite  slave  in  a  way  which  disturbs  the  modern 
conscience,  for  they  came  by  means  of  compulsion  in 
religion.  In  contrast  to  the  day  labourer  and  the 
'*  Toshab  "  or  sojourner,  the  slave  must  be  of  his  master's 
religion.  For  a  heathen,  however,  that  was  not  a  difficulty. 
His  gods  were  gods  of  his  land ;  and  when  he  left  his 
land  and  was  carried  into  a  foreign  country,  he  had  no 
scruple  about  worshipping  the  god  of  the  new  land.  A 
typical  case  of  this  is  found  in  the  narrative  2  Kings  xvii., 
where  the  immigrants  whom  the  king  of  Assyria  had 
settled  in  Samaria  after  Israel  had  been  carried  captive 
besought  him  to  send  some  one  to  teach  them  how  to 
worship  Yahweh.  This  adoption  of  the  master's  religion 
secured  equality  of  slave  and  free  to  a  degree  which 
could  not  otherwise  have  been  attained,  and  brought  the 
slaves  fully  within  the  humanity  of  the  Hebrew  law. 
It  gave  them  the  Sabbath  (chap.  v.  14).  It  gave  a  full 
share  in  all  the  religious  festivals  and  a  part  in  the 
sacrificial  feasts  (Deut.  xii.  12  and  xvi.  11,  14).  Such 
slaves  were,  in  fact,  fully  adopted  into  the  family  of  God, 
and  became  brethren,  poorer  and  more  unfortunate,  but 
still  brethren  of  their  masters.  They  had  indeed  no  claim 
to  freedom,  as  Israelite  slaves  had ;  they  were  slaves  in 
perpetuity.  But  their  slavery  was  of  a  kind  that  did  not 
degrade  them  beneath  the  condition  of  man. 

With  regard  to  Israelite  slaves  the  beneficence  of  the 
law  was  naturally  still  greater.  The  fullest  statement  in 
regard  to  them  is  found,  not  in  Deuteronomy,  but  in 
Lev.  XXV.  39-46 ;  but  in  the  main  we  may  suppose  that 
in  its  larger  outlines  the  distinction  between  Israelite 
and    non-Israelite    slaves   there   insisted    on  was  always 


\         LAJVS   OF  KINDNESS  429 

x , . 

— ^__ _ .       . 


acknowledged.  They  were  not  to  be  thrust  down  into 
the  lowest  depth  of  slavery,  and  they  were  not  to  be  set 
to  the  lowest  kinds  of  labour,  rather  to  that  which  hired 
labourers  were  wont  to  do,  because  they  were  of  the 
children  of  Israel,  of  the  nation  whom  Yahweh  had 
brought  out  of  the  house  of  bondage.  Further,  they  had 
a  right  to  emancipation  every  se\£nth  year,  that  is  to  say, 
whenever  they  had  served  six  full  y^ears  they  could  claim 
freedom  in  the  seventh.  Their  original  property  was 
meant  to  be  restored  to  them  in  the  Sabbatic  year,  and  so 
their  degradation  could  last  only  for  a  very  limited  time. 
In  Exod.  xxi.  2  ff.  we  find  the  original  provisions  con- 
cerning the  Israelite  slave.  Deuteronomy  simply  took 
these  up,  and  modified  them  in  certain  respects.  It 
extends  all  that  Exodus  says  of  the  slave  to  the  female 
slave  also,  and,  in  its  care  for  and  understanding  of  the 
difficulties  of  the  poor,  enacts  that  a  slave  when  set  free 
shall  receive  a  fresh  start  in  life  from  the  cattle,  the 
barn,  and  the  winepress  of  the  former  owner.  But  this 
anticipation  of  discharged  prisoners'  aid  societies  was  too 
high  a  demand  upon  a  faithless  generation.  Even 
Jeremiah  could  not  get  it  carried  out ;  and  the  probability 
is  that  none  but  the  most  spiritually  minded  of  the  Jews 
ever  regarded  it  as  binding  law. 

The  love  which  love  of  Yahweh  inspired  spread  still 
more  widely.  It  took  in  not  only  the  poor  and  the  slave, 
but  it  took  account  also  of  the  lower  animals.  It  has  been 
often  made  a  reproach  to  Christianity  that  it  makes  no 
such  appeal  on  behalf  of  the  lower  creation  as  Buddhism 
does.  But  that  reproach  (like  the  kindred  one  brought 
by  J.  S.  Mill,  that  in  comparison  with  the  Qur'an  the 
New  Testament  is  defective  in  not  pressing  civil  duty)  is 
tenable  only  if  the  New  Testament  be  absolutely  severed 
from  the  Old.  Taken  as  the  completion  of  the  moral 
and  religious  development   begun  in   Israel,   Christianity 


430  THE  BOOR  OF  DEUTERONOMl 


takes  up  into  itself  all  the  experience,  and  all  the  teach- 
ing by  example,  which  the  Old  Testament  contains.  It 
does  not  repeat  it,  because  to  the  first  Christians  the 
Old  Testament  was  the  Divinely  inspired  guide.  It  was 
at  first  their  whole  Bible,  auid  to  take  the  New  Testa- 
ment by  itself  as  an  inder^endent  product  is  to  mutilate 
both  the  Old  and  the  N/ew.  When  the  Old  Testament, 
tnereiore,  enjoins  kin^jness  to  animals  we  may  set  down 
all  that  it  prescri^hyes  to  the  credit  of  Christianity.  So 
much,  at  least,  thj^^  latter  must  be  held  to  teach ;  and  if  we 
consider  the  r.pirit  as  well  as  the  letter  of  this  law,  there 
IS  no  exaggp-'j-aj-JQ^  in  saying  that  it  covers  all  the  ground. 
Here,  a?.:"  in  the  case  of  slaves  and  the  poor,  the  funda- 
mental^; reason  for  kindness  is  relation  to  God.  In  the 
^^"'Vist's  narrative  in  Gen.  ii.  all  creatures  are  formed  by 
^'^od,  and  God  Himself  shows  kindness  to  them.  Indeed 
in  passages  like  Psalm  xxxvi.  7,  as  Cheyne  well  remarks, 
there  is  an  implication  *'  that  morally  speaking  there  is 
no  complete  break  of  continuity  in  the  scale  of  sentient 
life,"  and  that,  as  is  seen  by  passages  like  Jer.  xxi.  6, 
and  Isa.  iv.  11,  the  mild  domesticated  animals  ^'are  in 
fact  regarded  as  a  part  of  the  human  community."  In 
the  Decalogue  the  animals  that  labour  with  and  for  man 
have  their  share  in  the  Sabbath  rest,  and  the  produce  of 
the  fields  during  the  Sabbatic  year  (Exod.  xxiii.  1 1  ;  Lev. 
XXV.  7)  is  to  be  for  them  as  well  as  for  the  poor.  That  they 
were  mere  machines  of  flesh  and  blood,  to  be  driven  till 
they  were  worn  out,  and  were  then  to  be  cast  aside,  seems 
never  to  have  occurred  to  the  Israelite  mind.  These 
helpful  creatures  had  made  a  covenant  with  man,  and 
had  a  share  in  the  consideration  which  the  sons  of  Israel 
were  taught  to  have  for  one  another.  In  reaching  that 
attainment  Israel  had  reached  the  only  effective  ground 
for  dealing  with  animals,  as  Cheyne  says,  ^'  without 
inhumanity  and  without  sentimentalism  "     The  individual 


LAIVS  OF  KINDNESS  431 


prescriptions  of  Deuteronomy  emphasise  and  bring  down 
these  principles  into  the  practical  life.     It  is  probable  that 
the    precept    not    to    sreethe   a    kid    in    its    mother's  milk 
(Deut.  xiv.  2i)  was,  in  part  at  least,  a  law  of  kindness, 
founded    upon    a    reveren^-jal    feeling    for   the    parental 
relationship  even  in  this  lower  sphere.     The  command  in 
Deut.  xxii.  6  is  certainly  so.     W<^  read  there  :  "  If  a  bird's 
nest  chance  to  be  before  thee  in  the-  way,  in  any  tree  or  on 
the  ground,  with  young  ones  or  eggs,  and  the  dam  sitting 
upon  the  young,  or  upon  the  eggs,  thou  \shalt  not  take  the 
dam  with  the  young ;  thou  shalt  in  any  wt^e  let  the  dam 
go,  but  the  young  thou    mayest  take  unto  tliVself;  that 
it  may  be  well  with  thee,  and  that  thou  mayest\prolong 
thy  days."     Evidently  the    ground  of  sympathy  h^^e    is 
the  existence  and  the  sacredness  of  the  parental  relation- 
ship.    The  mother  bird  is  sacred  as  a  mother ;  and  lengui"? 
of  days    is  promised  to    those  who  regard    the    sanctity  ^\ 
of  motherhood  in  this  sphere,  as  it  is  promised  to  those         x^^ 
who   observe    the  fifth  commandment  of  the    Decalogue.  \ 

Thus  intimately  the  lower  creation  is  drawn  into  the  human 
sphere. 

The  only  other  precepts  under  this  head  are  that  a 
fallen  animal  is  always  to  be  lifted.  (Deut.  xxii.  4),  and 
the  ox  is  not  to  be  muzzled  when  it  is  treading  out  the 
corn  (Deut.  xxv.  4).  These  were  ordinary  prescriptions 
of  humanity,  bui  they  too  rest  upon  the  sympathetic 
identification  of  the  sufferings  and  wants  of  all  sentient 
beings  with  those  of  mankind.  It  may  be  objected, 
however,  that  St.  Paul  denies  that  the  last  precept 
really  was  due  to  pity  for  the  oxen.  In  i  Cor.  ix.  9, 
referring  to  it,  he  says,  "  Is  it  for  the  oxen  that  God  careth, 
or  saith  He  it  altogether  for  our  sake  ?  Yea,  for  our  sake 
it  was  written."  But  there  is  no  real  contradiction  here. 
It  is  quite  impossible  that  a  devout  Jew  like  St.  Paul  did 
not  believe  that  God's  **  tender  mercies  are  over  all  His 


/ 


432  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

works  "  (Psalm  cxlv.  9).  He  would  have,  'been  false  to  all 
his  training  had  he  not  accepted  that  as  a  fundamental 
axiom.  His  apparent  denial  does  r):ot  refer  at  all  to  the 
historic  fact  that  the  precept  was  given  because  of  God's 
care  for  oxen.  It  only  signifie.s  that,  when  taken  in  its 
highest  sense,  it  was  meant  to  form  character  in  men. 
St.  Paul  argues,  as  Alford.  says,  "  that  not  the  oxen,  but 
those  for  whom  the  law  was  given,  were  its  objects. 
Every  duty  of  humanity  has  for  its  ultimate  ground,  not 
the  mere  welfare  of  the  animal  concerned,  but  its  welfare  in 
that  system  of  which  man  is  the  head,  and  therefore  man's 
welfare."  l^n  fact  St.  Paul  understood  the  Old  Testament 
as  we  have  seen  it  demands  to  be  understood,  and  places 
the  duty  of  kindness  to  animals  in  its  right  relation  to  man. 
Ip  all  relations,  therefore,  Deuteronomy  insists  that  life's 
main  principle  shall  be  love  illumined  by  sympathy. 
Beginning  with  God  and  giving  man's  unquiet  heart  a  firm 
anchorage  there,  it  commands  that  all  creatures  about  us 
shall  be  embraced  in  the  same  sympathising  tenderness- 
It  forbids  us  to  look  upon  any  of  them  as  mere  instruments 
for  our  use,  for  all  of  them  have  ends  of  their  own  in  the 
loving  thought  of  God.  God  is  for  it  the  great  unifying, 
harmonising  power  in  the  world,  and  from  a  right  concep- 
tion of  Him  all  right  living  flows.  If  the  New  Testament 
asks  with  wonder  how  a  man  who  loves  not  his  brother 
whom  he  hath  seen  can  love  God  whom  he  hath  not  seen, 
the  Old  Testament  teaches  with  equal  emphasis  the 
complementary  truth  that  he  who  loves  not  God  whom  he 
hath  not  seen  will  never  love  as  he  ought  his  brother 
whom  he  hath  seen.  For  to  it  Yahweh  is  the  first  and 
last  word ;  and  all  the  growth  in  kindness,  gentleness, 
consideration,  and  goodness  which  can  be  traced  in  the 
revelation  given  to  Israel,  has  its  source  in  a  conception 
of  the  Divine  character  which  from  the  first  was  spiritual, 
and  was  moreover  unique  in  the  world. 


w 


\ 

\ 


CHAPTER   XXIV 

MOSES'    FAREWELL    ^PERCHES 
Deut.  iv.   1-40,  xxvii. — xx?- 

ITH  the  twenty-sixth  chapter  the  entirely   homo- 


geneous central  portion  of  the  Book  of  Deuteronomy 
ends,  and  it  concludes  it  most  worthily.     It  prescribes  two 
ceremonies  which  are   meant  to  give  solemn  expi'ession 
to    the    feeling  of  thankfulness   which    the    love  of  God, 
manifested   in   so  many  laws  and  precepts,  covering  th^^ 
commonest   details   of  life,    should    have   made    the  pre-  \^ 
dominant  feeling.     The  first  is  the  utterance  of  what  we 
have  called  the  "  liturgy  of  gratitude  "  at  the  time  of  the 
feast  of  firstfruits ;  and  the  second  is  the  solemn  dedication 
of  the  third  year's  tithe  to  the  poor  and  the  fatherless,  and 
the  disclaimer    of  any  misuse  of  it.     Further  notice    of 
either  after  what  has  already   been   said  in  reference  to 
them  would  be  superfluous.     The  closing  verses  (16-19) 
of  the    chapter    are   a    solemn    reminder    that    all    these 
transactions  with  God  had  bound  the  people  to  Yahweh  in 
a  covenant.     "Thou hast  avouched  Yahweh  this  day  to  be 
thy  God"  and,  "  Yahweh  hath  avouched  thee  this  day  to 
be  a  peculiar  people  {'am  segfdldh)  unto  Himself."     By  this 
they  were  bound  to  keep  Yahweh's  statutes  and  judgments, 
and  do  them  with  all  their  heart  and  with  all  their  soul, 
while  He,  on  His  part,  undertakes  on  these  terms  to  set 
them   "  high  above  all   nations  which   He  hath  made  in 
praise,  and  in  name,  and  in  honour,"  and  to  make  them  a 
holy  people  unto  Himself. 

433  28 


/ 


434  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

But  the  original  Deuteronomy  as  read  to  King  Josiah 
cannot  have  ended  with  chapter  xxvi.,  for  the  thing  that 
awed  him  most  was  the  threat  of^'evil  and  desolation 
which  were  to  follow  the  non-observance  of  this  covenant. 
Now  though  there  are  indication/s  of  such  dangers  in  the 
first  twenty-six  chapters  of  Deuteronomy,  yet  threats  are 
not,  so  far,  a  prominent  part  of  this  book.  The  book  as 
read  must  consequently  have  contained  some  additional 
chapters,  which,  in  part  at  least,  must  have  contained 
threats.  Now  thif=/  is  what  we  have  in  our  Biblical  Deuter- 
onomy. But  .-'in  chapters  xxvii.  and  xxviii.  there  are 
reduplicatioiis  which  can  hardly  have  formed  part  of  the 
original  author's  work.  An  examination  of  these  has  led 
every  One  who  admits  composite  authorship  in  the  Penta- 
teugli  to  see  that  from  chapter  xxvii.  onwards  the  original 
Vvbrk  has  been  broken  up  and  dovetailed  again  with  the 
works  of  JE  and  P;  so  that  component  parts  of  the  first 
four  books  of  the  Hexateuch  appear  along  with  elements 
which  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  has  supplied.  We 
have,  in  fact,  before  us,  from  this  point,  the  work  of  the 
editor  who  fitted  Deuteronomy  into  the  framework  of  the 
Pentateuch ;  and  it  is  of  importance,  from  an  expository 
point  of  view  even,  to  endeavour  to  restore  Deuteronomy 
to  its  original  form,  and  to  follow  out  the  traces  of  it  that 
are  left. 

As  we  have  said,  we  must  look  for  the  threats  and 
promises  which  undoubtedly  formed  part  of  it.  These 
are  contained  in  chapters  xxvii.  and  xxviii.  But  a  care- 
ful reader  will  feel  at  once  that  chapter  xxvii.  disturbs 
the  connection,  and  that  xxviii.  should  follow  xxvi.  In 
chapter  xxvii.,  vv.  9  and  10  alone  seem  necessary  to 
give  a  transition  to  chapter  xxviii. ;  and  if  all  the  rest 
were  omitted  we  should  have  exactly  what  the  narrative 
in  Kings  would  lead  us  to  expect,  a  coherent,  natural 
sequence  of  blessings  and    curses,   which    should   follow 


MOSES'  FAREWELL  SPEECHES  435 

faithfulness  to  the  covenant,  or  unfaithfulness.  The 
rest  of  chapter  xxvii.  is  not  consistent  either  with  itself 
or  with  Josh.  viii.  30,  where  the  accomplishment  of  that 
which  is  commanded  here  is  recorded.  In  vv.  1-3  Moses 
and  the  elders  command  the  people  to  set  up  great  stones 
and  plaister  them  with  plaister  and  write  upon  them  all 
the  words  of  this  law,  on  the  day  when  they  shall  pass 
over  Jordan,  that  they  may  go  in  unto  the  land.  In  ver.  4 
it  is  said  that  these  stones  are  to  be  set  up  in  Mount 
Ebal,  and  there  an  altar  of  unhewn  ii-ones  is  to  be  built, 
and  sacrifices  offered,  *'  and  thou  shalfe  write  upon  the 
stones  very  plainly."  From  the  position  of  this  last 
clause  and  the  mention  of  Mount  Ebal,  the  course  of 
events  would  be  quite  different  from  that  which  vv.  1-3 
suggest.  The  stones  were,  according  to  the  verses  4flf., 
to  be  set  up  in  Mount  Ebal ;  out  of  these  an  altar  of 
unhewn  stones  was  to  be  built;  and  on  them  the  law 
was  to  be  inscribed,  and  this  is  what  Joshua  says  was 
done.  But  if  we  take  all  the  verses,  1-8,  together,  we  can 
reconcile  them  only  by  the  hypothesis  that  the  stones  were 
set  up  as  soon  as  Jordan  was  crossed,  piaistered,  and 
inscribed  with  the  law  ;  that  afterwards  they  were  removed 
to  Mount  Ebal  and  built  into  an  altar  "of  unhewn  stone," 
upon  which  sacrifices  were  offered.  But  that  surely  is 
in  the  highest  degree  improbable;  and  since  we  know 
that  in  other  cases  two  narratives  have  been  combined 
in  the  sacred  text,  that  would  seem  the  most  probable 
solution  here.  Verses  4-8  will  in  that  case  be  a  later 
insertion,  probably  from  J.  In  the  same  connection 
vv.  1 5-26  contain  a  list  of  crimes  which  are  visited  with 
a  curse  and  no  blessings ;  this  cannot  be  the  proclamation 
of  blessing  and  cursing  which  is  here  required.  Further, 
this  list  must  be  by  a  different  author,  for  it  affixes  curses 
to  some  crimes  which  are  not  mentioned  in  Deuteronomy, 
and  omits  such  sins  as  idolatry,  which  are  continually 


436  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


mentioned  there.  This  section  must  conser'^uently  have 
been  inserted  here  by  some  later  hand.  IK^must  probably 
have  been  later  even  than  the  time  "''of  the  v^riter  of 
Josh.  viii.  33  ff.,  since  the  arrangeme  iiit  as  reported  there 
differs  from  what  is  prescribed  he -Ire.  Moreover,  as  there 
is  nothing  new  in  these  sect^ions,  and  all  they  say  is 
repeated  substantially  in  ch?*Ipter  xxviii.,  we  may  give  our 
attention  wholly  to  char^jter  xxviii.  1-68,  as  being  the 
original  proclamation    'of  blessing  and  curse. 

But   other  entan-^^^lements  follow.     Chapters  xxix.   and 
XXX.  manifestly    Ubntained  an  adieu  on  the  part  of  Moses, 
who   turns    ^^"^iially   to  the   people  with   an  affecting  and 
solemn    s^-^^iech    of  farewell.     That   appears   in    chapters 
xxix.   ai^id  XXX.     But  for  many  reasons  it  is  impossible 
to   bf^-lieve    that    these    chapters   as    they    stand    are   the 
or'^ginal   speech   of   Deuteronomy.^     The   language    is    in 
/large    part    different,    and    there    are    references    to    the 
Book   of   the   Law  as    being  already  written   out   (chap, 
xxix.   19  f  26,  and  chap.  xxx.  10).     It  is  probably  there- 
fore an  editor's  rewriting  of  the  original  speech,  and  from 
the  fact  that  ''it    contains    many  points   of  contact  with 
Jeremiah  in  thoughts  and  words,"  it    is    probably  to    be 
dated  in  the  Exile.     But  there  is  another  noticeable  thing 
in  connection  with  it.     It  has  a  remarkable  resemblance  in 
these  and  other  respects  to  chapter  iv.  1-40.     That  passage 
can  hardly  have  originally  followed  chapters  i. — iii.,  if  as 
is  most   probable  these  were  at  first   an   historic   intro- 
duction  to    Deuteronomy.      The    hortative    character   of 
iv.  1-40  shows  that  it  must  have  been  placed  where  it 
is  by  a  reviser.     But  the  language,  though  not  altogether 
that  of  Deuteronomy,  is  like  it,  and  the  thought  is  also 
Deuteronomic.     Probably   the   passage   must    have   been 
transferred  from    some  other  part  of  Deuteronomy  and 

'  Cf.  Dillmann,  Deuieronoyny,  pp.  1 78  ff. 


MOSES'  FAREWELL  SPEECHES  437 

adapted  by  the  editor.  A  clue  to  its  true  place  may 
perhaps  be  found  in  ver.  8,  where  "all  this  law"  is  spoken 
of  as  if  it  were  already  given,  and  in  ver.  5,  where  we 
read,  "  Behold,  I  have  taught  you  statutes  and  judgments." 
These  passages  imply  that  the  law  of  Deuteronomy  had 
been  given,  and  in  that  case  chapter  iv.  must  belong  to 
a  closing  speech.  We  probably  shall  not  be  in  error, 
therefore,  in  thinking  that  chapters,  iv.  1-40  and  xxix.  and 
XXX.  are  all  founded  on  an  original  farewell  speech  which 
stood  in  Deuteronomy  after  the  blessing  and  the  curse. 

But  it  may  be  asked,  if  that  be  so,  why  did  an  editor 
make  these  changes  ?  The  answer  is  to  be  found  in  two 
passages  in  chapters  xxxi.  and  xxxii.  which  cannot 
be  harmonised  as  they  stand.  In  xxxi.  19  we  are  told 
that  Yahweh  commanded  Moses  to  write  "this  song"  and 
teach  it  to  the  children  of  Israel,  "that  this  song  may  be  a 
witness  for  Me  against  the  children  of  Israel,"  and  ver.  22, 
"So  Moses  wrote  this  song."  But  in  vv.  28  f.  we  read 
that  "  Moses  said.  Assemble  unto  me  all  the  elders 
of  the  tribes  and  your  officers,  that  I  may  speak  these 
words  in  their  ears,  and  call  heaven  and  earth  to 
witness  against  them."  Obviously  "  these  words "  are 
different  from  "  this  song,"  and  are  meant  for  a  different 
purpose.  The  same  ambiguity  occurs  at  the  end  of  the 
song  in  vv.  44  ff.,  where  we  first  read  of  Moses  ending 
"  this  song,"  and  in  the  next  verse  we  read,  "  And  Moses 
made  an  end  of  speaking  all  these  words  to  all  Israel." 
Now  what  has  become  of  "  these  words  "  ?  In  all  probability 
they  were  the  substance  of  chapters  iv.  and  xxix.  and  xxx., 
and  were  separated  and  amplified,  because  the  editor  who 
fitted  Deuteronomy  into  the  Pentateuch  took  over  the 
song  in  chapter  xxxii.,  as  well  as  those  passages  of  xxxi. 
and  xxxii.  that  speak  of  this  song,  from  JE.  He  accepted 
them  as  a  fitting  conclusion  for  the  career  of  Moses, 
and   transferred  the  original  speech,  which  we   suppose 


438  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

to  have  been  the  last  great  utterance  of  the  orignal 
Deuteronomy,  putting  the  main  part  of  it  immediately 
before  the  song,  but  taking  parts  out  of  it  to  form  a 
hortatory  ending  (such  as  the  other  Moses'  speeches 
have)  to  that  first  one  which  he  had  formed  out  of  the 
historic  introduction.  This  may  seem  a  very  complicated 
process  and  an  unHkely  one  ;  but  after  the  foundation  had 
been  built  by  Dillmann,  Westphal  has  elaborated  the 
whole  matter  with  such  luminous  force  that  it  seems 
hardly  possible  to  doubt  that  the  facts  can  be  accounted 
for  only  in  this  way.  By  piecing  together  iv.,  xxx.,  and 
xxxi.  he  produces  a  speech  so  thoroughly  coherent  and 
consistent  that  the  mere  reading  of  it  becomes  the  most 
cogent  proof  of  the  substantial  truth  of  his  argument.^ 

An  anal3^sis  of  it  will  show  this,  (i)  There  is  the 
introduction ;  up  till  now  the  people  have  understood 
neither  the  commands  nor  the  love  of  Yahweh  (xxix.  1-9). 

(2)  There  is  the  explanation  of  the  Covenant  (xxix.  10-15)  ) 

(3)  A  command  to  observe  the  Covenant  (iv.  1,2);  (4) 
Warning  against  individual  transgression,  which  will  be 
punished  by  the  destruction  of  the  rebel  (xxix.  16-21,  iv. 
3,  4)  ;  (5)  Warning  against  collective  transgression,  which 
will  be  punished  by  the  ruin  of  the  people  (iv.  5"26). 
The  author,  from  this  point  regarding  the  transgression  as 
an  accomplished  fact,  announces  :  (6)  The  dispersion  and 
exile  of  the  people  (iv.  27,  28)  ;  (7)  The  impression  pro- 
duced on  future  generations  by  the  horror  of  this  disper- 
sion (xxix.  22-28) ;  (8)  The  conversion  of  the  exiles  to 
God  (iv.  30,  31);  (9)  Their  return  to  the  land  of  their 
fathers  xxx.  (i-io).     (10)  In  conclusion,  it  is  stated  that 

•  Le  Deuteronome  (Toulouse,  1891),  pp.  62-75.  The  order  in  which  he 
disposes  of  the  verses  is  as  follows:  Deut.  xxxi.  24-29,  xxix.  I-I5»  iv.  i,  2, 
xxix.  16-21,  iv.  3-30,  xxix.  22-28,  iv.  30,  31,  xxx.  I-IO,  iv.  32-40,  xxx. 
11-20,  xxxii.  45-47.  If  before  this  we  place  xxxi.  1-13,  we  shall 
probably  have  the  original  sequence  fully  restored. 


HOSES'  FAREWELL   SPEECHES  439 

the  power  of  Yahweh  to  sustain  the  faith  of  His  people 
and  to  save  them  is  guaranteed  by  the  past  (iv.  32-40)  ; 
and  there  is  no  reason  therefore  that  the  people  should 
shrink  from  obeying  the  commandment  prescribed  to 
them.  It  is  a  matter  of  will.  Life  and  death  are  before 
them;  let  them  choose  (xxx.  11-20). 

The  analysis  of  the  remaining  chapters  is  not  difficult. 
Chapter  xxxi.,  vv.  14-23  and  30,  form  the  introduction 
to  the  song,  chapter  xxxii.,  vv.  1-43,  just  as  ver.  44  is  the 
conclusion  of  it.  Both  introduction  and  song  are  extracted 
probably  from  J  and  E.  Verses  48-52  are  after  P.  Then 
follows  the  blessing  of  Moses,  chapter  xxxiii.  Finally, 
chapter  xxxiv.  contains  an  account  of  Moses'  death  and  a 
final  eulog}^  of  him,  in  which  all  the  sources  JE,  P,  and  D 
have  been  called  into  requisition.  The  threefold  cord 
which  runs  through  the  other  books  of  the  Pentateuch 
was  untwisted  to  receive  Deuteronomy,  and  has  been  re- 
twisted  so  as  to  bind  the  Pentateuch  into  one  coherent 
whole.  That  is  the  result  of  the  microscopic  examination 
which  the  text  as  it  stands  has  undergone,  and  we  may 
pretty  certainly  accept  it  as  correct.  But  we  should  not 
lose  sight  of  the  fact  that,  as  the  book  is  now  arranged, 
it  has  a  notable  coherence  of  its  own,  and  the  impression 
of  unity  which  it  conveys  is  in  itself  a  result  of  great 
literary  skill.  Not  only  has  the  editor  combined  Deuter- 
onomy into  the  other  narratives  most  successfully,  but 
he  has  done  so  not  only  without  falsifying,  but  so  as 
to  confirm  and  enhance  the  impression  which  the  original 
book  was  meant  to  convey. 

We  turn  now  to  the  substance  of  the  two  speeches — the 
proclamation  of  the  blessing  and  the  curse,  and  the  great 
farewell  address.  As  we  have  seen,  the  first  is  contained 
in  chapter  xxviii.  If  any  evidence  were  now  needed  that 
this  chapter  was  written  later  than  the  Mosaic  time,  it 
might  be  found  in  the  space  given  to  the  curses,  and  the 


440  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

much  heavier  emphasis  laid  upon  them  than  upon  the 
blessings.  Not  that  Moses  might  not  have  prophetically 
foretold  Israel's  disregard  of  warnings.  But  if  the  heights 
to  which  Israel  was  actually  to  rise  had  been  before 
the  author's  mind  as  still  future,  instead  of  being  wrapped 
in  the  mists  of  the  past,  he  could  not  but  have  dwelt 
more  equally  upon  both  sides  of  the  picture.  Whatever 
supernatural  gifts  a  prophet  might  have,  he  was  still  and 
in  all  things  a  man.  He  was  subject  to  moods  like 
others,  and  the  determination  of  these  depended  upon  his 
surroundings.  He  was  not  kept  by  the  power  of  God 
beyond  the  shadows  which  the  clouds  in  his  sky  might 
cast ;  and  we  may  safely  say  that  if  the  curses  which  are 
to  follow  disobedience  are  elaborated  and  dwelt  upon 
much  more  than  the  blessings  which  are  to  reward  obedi- 
ence, it  is  because  the  author  lived  at  a  time  of  unfaith- 
fulness and  revolt.  Obviously  his  contemporaries  were 
going  far  in  the  evil  way,  and  he  warns  them  with  intense 
and  eager  earnestness  against  the  dangers  they  are  so 
recklessly  incurring. 

But  after  all  we  have  seen  of  the  spirituality  of  the 
Deuteronomic  teaching,  and  its  insistence  upon  love  as 
the  true  bond  between  men  and  God  and  the  true  motive 
to  all  right  action,  it  is  perhaps  disappointing  to  some  to 
find  how  entirely  these  promises  and  threats  have  their 
centre  in  the  material  world.  Probably  nowhere  else  will 
the  truth  of  Bacon's  famous  saying  that  "  Prosperity  is 
the  blessing  of  the  Old  Testament"  be  more  conspicuously 
seen  than  here.  If  Israel  be  faithful  she  is  promised  pro- 
ductivity, riches,  success  in  war.  Even  when  it  is  promised 
that  she  shall  be  established  by  Yahweh  as  a  holy  people 
unto  Himself,  the  meaning  seems  to  be  that  the  people 
shall  be  separated  from  others  by  these  earthly  favours, 
rather  than  that  they  shall  have  the  moral  and  spiritual 
qualities  which  the  word  "  holy "  now  connotes.     Other 


MOSES'  FAREWELL  SPEECHES  441 

nations  shall  fear  Israel  because  of  the  Divine  favour. 
Israel  shall  be  raised  above  them  all.  If  it  become  un- 
faithful, on  the  other  hand,  it  is  to  be  visited  with  pesti- 
lence, consumption,  fever,  inflammation,  sword,  blasting, 
mildew.  The  earth  is  to  be  iron  beneath  them,  and  the 
heaven  above  them  brass.  Instead  of  rain  they  are  to  have 
dust;  they  are  to  be  visited  with  more  than  Egyptian 
plagues.  Their  minds  are  to  refuse  to  serve  them ;  they 
are  to  be  defeated  in  war ;  their  country  is  to  be  overrun  by 
marauders ;  their  wives  and  children,  their  cattle  and  their 
crops,  are  to  fall  into  the  enemy's  hands.  Locusts  and  all 
known  pests  are  to  fall  upon  their  fields ;  and  they  them- 
selves are  to  be  carried  away  captive,  after  having  endured 
the  worst  horrors  of  siege,  and  been  compelled  by  hunger 
to  devour  their  own  children.  And  in  exile  they  shall  be 
an  astonishment,  a  proverb,  and  a  by-word,  and  shall  be 
ruled  by  oppressive  aliens.  Worst  of  all,  they  shall  there 
lose  hope  in  God  and  "  shall  serve  other  gods,  even  wood 
and  stone."  Their  lives  shall  hang  in  doubt  before  them. 
In  the  morning  they  shall  say,  "Would  God  it  were 
evening,"  and  at  even  they  shall  say,  ''  Would  God  it 
were  morning."  All  the  deliverance  Yahweh  had  wrought 
for  them  by  bringing  them  out  of  Egypt  would  be  undone, 
and  once  more  they  should  go  back  into  Egyptian  bondage. 

All  that  is  materialistic  enough  ;  but  there  is  no  need 
to  make  apology  for  Deuteronomy,  nevertheless.  The 
prophet  has  taught  the  higher  law ;  he  has  rooted  all 
human  duty,  both  to  God  and  man,  in  love  to  God,  and 
now  he  tries  to  enlist  man's  natural  fear  and  hope  as 
allies  of  his  highest  principle.  How  justifiable  that  is 
we  have  already  seen  in  Chapter  XII.,  pp.  231  ff. 

But  a  more  serious  question  is  raised  when  it  is  asked, 
does  Nature,  in  definite  sober  truth,  lend  itself,  in  the 
manner  implied  throughout  this  chapter,  to  the  support 
of  religious  and  moral  fidelity  ?     At  a  time  when  imagina- 


442  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

tive  literature  is  largely  devoting  itself  to  an  angry  or 
querulous  denial  of  any  righteous  force  working  for  the 
unfortunate  and  the  faithful/  there  can  be  no  question 
what  the  popular  answer  to  such  a  question  would  be. 
But  from  the  ranks  of  literature  itself  we  may  summon 
testimony  on  the  other  side.  Mr.  Hall  Caine,  in  his 
address  at  the  Edinburgh  Philosophical  Institution, 
maintains  in  a  wider  and  more  general  way  the  essence  of 
the  Deuteronomic  thesis  when  he  says,  "  I  count  him  the 
greatest  genius  who  touches  the  magnetic  and  Divine 
chord  in  humanity  which  is  always  waiting  to  vibrate  to 
the  sublime  hope  of  recompense  ;  I  count  him  the  greatest 
man  who  teaches  men  that  the  world  is  ruled  in  righteous- 
ness." And  his  justification  of  that  position  is  too 
admirable  not  to  be  quoted :  ''  Life  is  made  up  of  a 
multitude  of  fragments,  a  sea  of  many  currents,  often 
coming  into  collision  and  throwing  up  breakers.  We 
look  around  and  see  wrong-doing  victorious,  and  right- 
doing  in  the  dust ;  the  evil  man  growing  rich  and  dying 
in  his  bed,  the  good  man  becoming  poor  and  dying  in  the 
street ;  and  our  hearts  sink  and  we  say.  What  is  God 
doing  after  all  in  this  world  of  His  children  ?  But  our 
days  are  few,  our  view  is  limited,  we  cannot  watcli  the 
event  long  enough  to  see  the  end  which  Providence  sees." 
**  It  is  the  very  province  of  imaginative  genius,"  he  goes 
on  to  say,  **  to  see  that  which  the  common  mind  cannot 
see,  to  offer  to  it  at  least  suggestions  of  how  these 
triumphs  of  unrighteousness  may  be  accounted  for  in 
accordance  with  the  law  that  righteousness  rules  in  the 
world."  We  would  go  further.  It  is  one  of  the  main 
purposes  of  inspiration  to  go  beyond  even  imaginative 
genius,  to  point  out  in  history  not  only  how  right  may 
perhaps  ultimately  triumph,  but  how  it  has  been  in  reality 

'  Cf.  Recent  fiction,  e.g.  The  African  Farm,   Tess  of  the  D'Urbevilles, 
The  Heavenly  Twins. 


MOSES'  FAREWELL  SPEECHES  443 


and  must  be  victorious.  For  it  will  not  do  to  shut  off  the 
world  of  material  things  from  the  working  of  this  great 
and  universal  law.  Owing  to  the  narrow  fanaticism  of 
science,  modern  men  have  become  sceptical,  not  only 
of  miracle,  but  even  of  the  fundamental  truth  that 
righteousness  is  profitable  for  the  Hfe  that  now  is,  that  in 
following  righteousness  men  are  co-operating  with  the 
deepest  law  of  the  universe.  But  it  remains  a  truth  for 
all  that.  It  is  written  deep  in  the  heart  of  man  ;  and  in 
more  wavering  lines  perhaps,  but  still  most  legibly,  it 
is  written  on  the  face  of  things.  With  the  limitations 
of  his  time  and  place,  this  is  what  the  Deuteronomist 
preaches.  Doubtless  he  has  not  faced,  as  Job  does,  the 
whole  of  the  problem ;  still  less  has  he  attained  to  the 
final  insight  exhibited  in  the  New  Testament,  that 
temporal  gifts  may  be  curses  in  disguise,  that  the  highest 
region  of  recompense  is  in  the  eternal  life,  in  the  domain 
of  things  which  are  invisible  but  eternal.  He  does  not 
yet  know,  though  he  has  perhaps  a  presentiment  of  it, 
that  being  completely  stripped  of  all  earthly  good  may  be 
the  path  to  the  highest  victory — the  victory  which  makes 
men  more  than  conquerors  through  Christ.  Nevertheless 
he  is,  making  these  allowances,  right,  and  the  moderns 
are  wTong.  In  many  ways  obedience  to  spiritual  inspira- 
tions does  bring  worldly  prosperity.  The  absence  of 
moral  and  spiritual  faithfulness  does  affect  even  the  fruit- 
fulness  of  the  soil,  the  fecundity  of  animals,  the  prevalence 
of  disease,  the  stability  of  ordered  life  and  success  in 
war.  This  was  visible  to  the  ancient  world  generally  in 
a  dim  way ;  but  by  the  inspired  men  of  the  Old  Covenant 
it  was  clearly  seen,  for  they  were  enlightened  for  the  very 
purpose  of  seeing  the  hand  of  God  where  others  saw  it 
not.  But  they  never  thought  of  tracing  out  the  chain  of 
intermediate  causes^by  which  such  results  were  connected 
with    men's    spiritual    state.     They   saw   the    facts,    they 


i 


444  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

recognised  the  truth,  and  they  threw  themselves  back  at 
once  upon  the  will  of  God  as  the  sufficient  explanation. 

We,  on  the  other  hand,  have  been  so  diligent  in  tracing 
out  the  immediately  preceding  links  of  natural  causation 
that,  for  the  most  part,  we  have  been  fatigued  before  we 
reached  God.     We  consequently  have  lost  view  of  Him ; 
and  it  is  wholesome  for   us  to   be   brought   sharply  into 
contact  with  the   ancient  Oriental  mind  as  we  are  here, 
in  order  that  we  may  be  forced  to  go  the  whole  way  back 
to  Him.     For  the  fact  is  that  much  of  that  very  process 
of  decay  and  destruction  from  moral  causes  is  going  on 
before  us  in   countries  like   Turkey  and   Morocco,  where 
social    righteousness    is    all    but    unknown,    and    private 
morality  is  low.      A  truly  modern   mind  scorns  the  idea 
that  the  fertility  of  the  soil  can  be  affected  by  immorality. 
Yet  there  is  the  whole  of  Mesopotamia  to  show  that  mis- 
government  can  make  a  garden  into  a  desert.      Where 
teeming  populations  once  covered  the  country  with  fruitful 
gardens  and  luxurious  cities,  there  is  now  in  the  lands  of 
the  Tigris  and  Euphrates  a  few  handfuls  of  people,  and  all 
the  fertility  of  the  country  has   disappeared.      Irrigation 
channels  which   made  all  things  live  have  been   choked 
up   and    have    been   gradually  filled    with   drifting  sand, 
and  one  of  the  most  populous  and  fertile  countries  of  the 
world  has  become  a  desert.     In  Palestine  the  same  thing 
may  be  seen.     Under  Turkish  domination  the  character  of 
the  soil  has  been  entirely  changed.     In  many  places  where 
in   ancient  days   the  hills   were   terraced   to   the   top   the 
sweeping  rains  have  had  their  way,  and  the  very  soil  has 
been   carried   off,    leaving   only   rocks   to    blister   in    the 
pitiless   sun.      Even  in   the  less  likely  sphere  of  animal 
fecundity   modern    science    shows    that    peace    and    good 
government    and   righteous   order   are   causes   of  extra- 
ordinary power.     And  the   movements   which  are  going 
on  around  us  at  this  day  in  the  elevation  and  depression 


MOSES'  FAREWELL  SPEECHES  445 


of  nations  and  races  have  a  visible  connection  with  fidelity 
or  lack  of  fidelity  to  known  principles  of  order  and  justice. 
This  can  be  said  without  concealing  how  scanty  and 
partial  in  most  cases  .such  attainments  are.  Prevailing 
principles  can  be  discerned  in  the  providence  which  rules 
the  world.  And  these  are  of  such  a  kind  that  the  connec- 
tion which  obedience  to  the  highest  known  rules  of  life 
has  with  fertility,  success  and  prosperity,  is  constant  and 
intimate.  It  is,  too,  far  wider  reaching  than  at  first  sight 
would  seem  possible.  To  this  extent,  even  modern 
knowledge  justifies  these  blessings  and  curses  of 
Deuteronomy. 

But  it  may  be  asked,  Is  this  all  the  Old  Testament 
means  by  such  threats  and  promises  ?  Does  it  recognise 
any  even  self-imposed  limitations  to  the  direct  action  of 
Divine  power?  Most  probably  it  does  not.  Though 
always  keeping  clear  of  Pantheism,  the  Old  Testament 
is  so  filled  and  possessed  by  the  Divine  Presence  that 
all  second  causes  are  ignored,  and  the  action  of  God 
upon  nature  was  conceived,  as  it  could  not  fail  to  be,  on 
the  analogy  of  a  workman  using  tools.  Now  that  the 
methods  of  Divine  action  in  nature  have  been  studied 
in  the  light  of  science,  they  have  been  found  to  be  more 
fixed  and  regular  than  was  supposed.  The  extent  of 
their  operation,  too,  has  been  found  to  be  immeasurably 
wider,  and  the  purposes  which  have  to  be  cared  for  at 
every  moment  are  now  seen  to  be  infinitely  various.  As 
a  result,  human  thought  has  fallen  back  discouraged, 
and  takes  refuge  more  and  more  in  a  conception  of 
nature  which  practically  deifies  it,  or  at  least  entirely 
separates  it  from  any  intimate  relation  to  the  will  of 
God.  It  is  even  denied  that  there  is  any  purpose  in 
the  world  at  all,  or  any  goal,  and  to  chance  or  fate  all 
the  vicissitudes  of  Hfe  and  the  mechanical  changes  of 
nature  are  attributed.     But  though  we  must  recognise,  as 


446  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

the  Old  Testament  does  not,  that  ordinary  Divine  action 
flows  out  in  perfectly  well-defined   channels,   and   is  so 
stable  in  its  movement  that  results  in  the  sphere  of  physical 
nature  may  be  predicted  with  certainty  ;  and  though  we 
see,  as  was  not  seen  in  ancient  days,  that  even  God  does 
not   always  approach   His  ends  by  direct  and  short-cut 
paths, — these  considerations  only  make  the  Old  Testament 
view  more  inspiring  and  more  healthful  for  us.     We  may 
gather  from  it  the  inference  that  if  the  fertility  of  a  land, 
the    frequency    of   disease,    and    success    in    war   are    so 
powerfully  affected  by  the  moral  and  spiritual  quality  of 
a  people,  it  is  very  likely  that  in  subtler  and  less  palpable 
ways  the    same  influences   produce   similar  effects,  even 
in  regions  where  they  cannot  be  traced.     If  so,  whatever 
allowance   may  be    required  for  the   inevitable  simplicity 
of  Old  Testament  conceptions   on  this  subject,  however 
much  we  miss  the  limitations  we  have  learned  to  regard 
as  necessary,  the  Deuteronomic  view  as  to  the  effects  oi 
moral  and  spiritual  declension  upon  the  material  fortunes 
of  a  people  is  much  nearer  the  truth  than  our  timorous 
and   hesitating  half-belief.     To  find  these   effects  empha- 
sised and    affirmed  as    they  are  here,    therefore,   acts  as 
a  much  needed  tonic  in  our  spiritual  life.      Coming  too 
from  a  man  who    possessed,   if   ever  man   did,   Divinely 
inspired    insight  into  the  process  of  the  world  and   the 
ideal  of  human  life,  these  promises  and  warnings  bring 
God  near.     They  dissipate  the  mists  which   obscure    the 
workings  of  God's  Providence,  and  keep  before  us  aspects 
of  truth  which  it  is  the  present  tendency  of  thought  to 
ignore  too  much.     They  declare  in  accents  which  carry 
conviction  that,  even  in  material  things,  the  Lord  reigneth  ; 
and    for    that    the    world    has    reason    to    be    supremely 
glad. 

Certainly    Christians    now    know    that    prosperity    in 
material    things  is  by  no   means    God's  best  gift.     That 


MOSES  FAREWELL  SPEECHES  447 


great  principle  must  be  held  to  firmly,  as  well  as  the 
legitimacy  of  the  vivid  hopes  and  fears  of  Old  Testament 
times  regarding  the  material  rewards  of  right-doing.  In 
many  ways  the  new  principle  must  overrule  and  modify 
for  us  those  hopes  and  fears.  But  with  this  limitation 
we  are  justified  in  occupying  the  Deuteronomic  stand- 
point and  in  repeating  the  Deuteronomic  warnings.  For 
to  its  very  core  the  world  is  God's  ;  and  those  who  find 
His  working  everywhere  are  those  whose  eyes  have  been 
opened  to  the  inmost  truth  of  things. 

With  regard  to  the  farewell  speech  contained  in 
chapters  xxix.  and  xxx.  and  the  related  parts  of  chapter  iv. 
and  chapter  xxxi.  there  is  not  much  to  be  said.  Taken 
as  a  whole,  it  develops  the  promises  and  threats  of  the 
previous  chapters,  and  repeats  again  with  affectionate 
hortatory  purpose  much  of  the  history.  But  there  is 
not  a  great  deal  that  is  new ;  most  of  the  underlying 
principles  of  the  address  have  been  already  dealt  with. 
Taken  according  to  the  reconstruction  of  the  speech 
and  its  reinsertion  in  its  original  framework,  the  course 
of  things  would  seem  to  have  been  this.  After  the 
threats  and  promises  had  been  concluded,  Moses,  carry- 
ing on  the  injunction  of  iii.  28,  addressed  (chapter 
xxxii.  8)  all  the  people  and  appointed  Joshua  to  be  his 
successor ;  then  he  wrote  out  "  this  law,"  and  produced 
it  before  the  priests  and  elders  of  the  people,  with 
the  instruction  that  at  the  end  of  every  seven  years, 
at  the  feast  of  release,  in  the  feast  of  tabernacles,  it 
should  be  read  before  all  Israel,  men,  women,  and  child- 
ren (chapter  xxxi.,  vv.  9-13)-  Then  he  gave  the  book 
to  the  Levites,  that  they  might  *'  lay  it  up  "  by  the  side 
of  the  Ark  of  the  Covenant  of  Yahweh  their  God,  that 
it  might  be  there  for  a  witness  against  them  when  they 
became  unfaithful,  as  he  foresaw  they  would.  He  next 
summons  all  Israel  to  him,  and  delivers  the  farewell  address 


448  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

contained  in  chapters  iv.,  xxix.,  and  xxx.,  an  outline  of 
which  has  already  been  given  (p.  438),  according  to  West- 
phal's  recombination.  This  would  seem  to  indicate  that 
Moses  himself  inaugurated  the  custom  of  reading  the  law 
and  giving  instruction  to  all  the  people,  which  he  pre- 
scribed for  the  feast  of  tabernacles  in  the  year  of  release. 
After  the  law  had  been  given  he  addressed  the  whole 
people  in  this  farewell  speech. 

But  though  on  the  whole  there  is  no  need  for  detailed 
exposition  here,  there  are  one  or  two  things  which  ought 
to  be  noticed,  things  which  express  the  spirit  of  Deuter- 
onomy so  directly  and  so  sincerely  that  they  can  be 
identified  as  forming  part  of  the  original  Deuteronomic 
speech.  One  of  these  is  unquestionably  xxx.  1 1-20.  At 
the  end  of  the  farewell  address  a  return  is  made  to  the 
core  of  the  whole  Deuteronomic  teaching  :  ''  Thou  shalt 
love  Yahweh  thy  God  with  all  thy  heart,  and  with  all 
thy  soul,  and  with  all  thy  might."  This  was  announced 
with  unique  emphasis  at  the  beginning ;  it  has  lain  behind 
all  the  special  commands  which  have  been  insisted  upon 
since ;  and  now  it  emerges  again  into  view  as  the 
conclusion  of  the  whole  matter.  For  beyond  doubt  this, 
and  not  the  whole  series  of  legal  precepts,  is  what  is 
meant  by  ''this  commandment"  in  verse  11.  Both  before 
it,  in  the  sixth  and  tenth  verses,  and  after  it,  in  the  sixteenth 
and  twentieth  verses,  this  precept  is  repeated  and  insisted 
on  as  the  Divine  command.  Had  the  individual  commands 
or  the  whole  mass  of  them  together  been  meant,  the 
phrase  used  would  have  been  different.  It  would  have 
been  that  in  ver.  10,  where  they  are  called  "  His  command- 
ments and  His  statutes  which  are  written  in  this  book  of 
the  law,"  or  something  analogous.  No,  it  is  the  central 
command  of  love  to  God,  without  which  all  external 
obedience  is  vain,  which  is  the  theme  of  this  last  great 
paragraph ;  and  a  clear  perception   of  this  will  carry  us 


MOSES'  FAREWELL  SPEECHES.  449 


through  both  the  obscurities  of  it,  and  the  difficulties  of 
St.  Paul's  application  of  it  in  the  Romans. 

Of  this  then  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  says :  "  It  is 
not  too  hard  for  thee,  neither  is  it  far  off.  It  is  not  in 
heaven,  that  thou  shouldest  say,  Who  shall  go  up  for  us  to 
heaven,  and  bring  it  unto  us,  and  make  us  to  hear  it,  that 
-we  may  do  it  ?  Neither  is  it  beyond  the  sea,  that  thou 
shouldest  say,  Who  shall  go  over  the  sea  for  us,  and 
bring  it  unto  us,  and  make  us  to  hear  it,  that  we  may  do 
it  ?  But  the  word  is  very  nigh  unto  thee,  in  thy  mouth, 
and  in  thy  heart,  that  thou  mayest  do  it."  That  is  to  say, 
there  is  no  mystery  or  difficulty  about  this  commandment 
of  love.  Neither  have  you  to  go  to  the  uttermost  parts 
of^the  sea  to  hear  it,  nor  need  you  search  into  the 
mysteries  of  heaven.  It  has  been  brought  near  to  you  by 
all  the  mercy  and  forgiveness  and  kindness  of  Yahweh ; 
it  has  been  made  known  to  you  now  by  my  mouth,  even 
in  its  pettiest  applications.  But  that  is  not  all ;  it  is 
graven  on  your  own  heart,  which  leaps  up  in  glad 
response  to  this  demand,  and  in  answer  to  the  manifesta- 
tion of  God's  love  for  you.  It  is  really  the  fundamental 
principle  of  your  own  nature  that  is  appealed  to.  You 
should  clearly  feel  that  life  in  the  love  of  God  and  man  is 
the  only  fit  life  for  you  who  are  made  in  the  image  of 
God.  If  you  do,  then  the  fulfilment  of  all  the  Divine 
precepts  will  be  easy,  and  your  lives  will  lighten  more 
and  more  unto  the  perfect  day. 

Now,  for  an  Oriental  of  the  pre-Christian  era  such 
teaching  is  most  marvellous.  How  marvellous  it  is 
Christians  perhaps  find  it  difficult  to  see.  In  point  of 
fact,  many  have  denied  that  Old  Testament  teaching 
ever  had  this  character.  Misled  by  the  doctrines  of  Islam, 
the  great  Semitic  religion  of  to-day,  many  assert  that  the 
religion  of  ancient  Israel  called  upon  men  to  submit  to 
mere  power  in  submitting  to  God.     But  the  appeal  of  our 

29 


450  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

text  to  the  heart  of  man  shows  that  this  is  an  error.     No 
such  appeal  has  ever  been  made  to  Mohammedans.    Their 
state  of  mind  in  regard  to  God  is  represented  by  the  remark 
of  a  recent  traveller  in  Persia.     Speaking  of  the  Persian 
Babis,   who   may   be  described   roughly   as  an    heretical 
sect  whose  minds  have  been  formed  by  Mohammedanism, 
he  says  :  "  They  seemed  to  have  no  conception  of  absolute 
good,  or  absolute  truth ;  to  them  good  was  merely  what 
God  chose  to  ordain,  and  truth  what  He  chose  to  reveal, 
so  that  they  could   not  understand   how  any  one  could 
attempt  to  test  the  truth  of  a  rehgion  by  an  ethical  and 
moral  standard."  ^     Now  that  is  precisely  the  opposite  of 
the    Deuteronomic   attitude.       Israel    is    encouraged  and 
incited  to  right  action  by  having  it  pointed  out  that  not 
only    experience,   not    only    Divinely  given   statutes   and 
judgments,  but  the  very  nature  of  man  itself  guarantees 
the  truth  of  this  supreme  law  of  love. .    The  law  laid  upon 
men  is  nothing  strange  to,  or  incongruous  with,  their  own 
better  selves.     It  is  the  very  thing  which  their  hearts  have 
cried  out  for ;  when  it  is  proclaimed  the  higher  nature  in 
man  recognises  it  and  bows  before  it.     It  is  not  received 
because  of  fear,   nor   is  it    bowed    before   because   it   is 
backed  by  power  which  can  smite  men  to  the  dust.     No  ; 
even  in  its  ruins  human  nature  is  nobler  than  that ;  and 
Deuteronomy  everywhere  teaches  with  burning  conviction 
that  God  is  too  ethical  and  spiritual  in  nature  to  accept  the 
submission  of  a  slave. 

This  reading  of  our  passage^  is  plainly  that  which  St. 
Paul  takes  in  Rom.  x.  5  and  6.  He  perceives,  what  so 
many  fail  to  do,  that  the  spirit  and  scope  of  the 
Deuteronomic  teaching  are  different  from  that  of  the  purely 
legal  sections  of  the  Pentateuch.  Paul  therefore  quotes 
the  Pentateuch   as    having   already  made  the    distinction 

•  A  Year  Amoii^  the  Persians   E.  G." Browne,  p.  406. 


MOSES'  FAREWELL  SPEECHES  451 

between  works  and  faith  which  he  wishes  to  emphasise, 
and  as  having  distinctly  given  preference  to  the  latter. 
Leviticus,  keeps  men  at  the  level  of  the  worker  for  wages, 
while  Deuteronomy  in  this  passage,  by  making  love  to 
God  the  essence  of  all  true  observance  of  the  law,  raises 
them  almost  to  the  level  of  sons.  And  just  as  in  those ' 
ancient  days  the  highest  manifestations  of  God  had  not  ^ 
to  be  laboured  for  and  sought  by  impotent  strivings,  but  ' 
had  plainly  been  made  known  to  them  and  had  found  an 
echo  in  their  hearts,  so  now  the  highest  revelation  had 
been  brought  near  to  men  in  Christ,  and  had  found  a 
similar  response.  They  did  not  need  to  seek  it  in  heaven, 
for  it  had  been  brought  to  earth  in  the  Incarnation.  They 
did  not  need  to  descend  into  the  abyss,  for  all  that  was 
needed  had  been  brought  thence  by  Christ  at  His  resur- 
rection. And  in  the  New  Testament  as  in  the  Old,  the 
simplicity  of  the  entrance  into  true  relations  with  God 
is  emphasised.  Love  and  faith  are  the  fundamental 
conditions.  From  them  obedience  will  naturally  issue, 
since  "  to  faith  all  things  are  possible,  and  to  love  all 
things  are  easy." 


CHAPTER   XXV 

THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING  OF  MOSES 
(A).    The  Song  of  Moses 

Deut.   xxxii. 

CRITICS  have  debated  the  date,  authorship,  and  his- 
tory of  this  song.  For  the  present  purpose  it  is 
sufficient,  perhaps,  to  refer  to  the  statement  on  these 
points  in  the  note  below.^ 

But  in  discussing  the  meaning  and  contents  of  the  song 
the  differences  referred  to  cause  no  difficulties.     On  any 

*  The  song  is  described,  in  the  narrative  framework,  as  delivered 
through  Moses  to  the  children  of  Israel.  On  the  other  hand,  internal 
evidence  points  to  a  date  after  the  establishment  of  the  monarchy — when 
the  days  of  Moses  and  the  events  of  the  wilderness  were  old,  when  the 
fruits  of  the  land  were  gifts  of  God  in  present  use,  and  when  ingrati- 
tude and  rebellion  had  become  conspicuous,  so  that  judgment  was 
impending.  Either,  then,  Moses  took  his  stand,  in  the  spirit,  at  a  point 
of  time  long  subsequent  to  his  own  death,  adapted  the  song  to  its  cir- 
cumstances, and  spoke  not  to  his  own  generation  but  to  one  much  later; 
or  a  later  prophet  must  be  the  writer.  The  objection  to  the  former  view 
is  supported  by  argum.ents  drawn  from  various  features  in  the  language 
and  the  allusions  of  the  song,  which  are  asserted  to  be  indicative  of  the 
later  origin.  On  the  detail  of  these  we  cannot  dwell.  But  the  most 
interesting  part  of  the  argument  is  the  position  that  the  transference 
of  the  prophetic  consciousness  to  a  remote  future  period,  in  order  to 
give  hope  and  guidance  to  a  generation  not  the  prophet's  own,  is  too 
improbable  to  be  admitted. 

Such  a  process  is  now  generally  regarded  as  not  impossible  indeed, 
but  unheard  of  in  the  history  of  prophecy.  The  examination  of  the 
prophets  of  the  Old  Testament  has  convinced  students  that  the  prophet's 
vision  starts  from  his  own  time,  and  is  primarily  for  the  comfort  and 

452 


xxxii.]         THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING   OF  MOSES  453 

supposition  the  time  and  circumstances,  whether  assumed 
as  present,  or  actually  and  really  present  to  the  prophet's 
mind,  can  clearly  be  identified  as  not  earlier  than  those 
of  the  Syrian  wars.  Accepted  as  dealing  with  that  time, 
this  poem  takes  its  place  among  the  Psalms  of  that  period. 
Its  subject  is  a  very  common  one  in  Scripture :  the  good- 
ness of  Yahweh  to  His  people,  and  their  unfaithfulness 
to  Him ;  His  grief  at  their  rebelHon  ;  His  punishment 
of  them  by  heathen  oppressors  ;  and  His  turning  in  love 
to  them,  along  with  His  destruction  of  the  nations  who 
had  prematurely  triumphed  over  the  people  of  God. 
Practically  this  is  the  burden  of  all  the  prophecies,  as 
indeed  it  may  be  said  to  be  the  burden  of  the  whole  Book 
of  Deuteronomy  itself.  Here  it  is  stated  and  elaborated 
with  great  poetic  skill ;  but  in  the  main,  the  essential 
thought,  there  is  little  that  has  not  already  been 
elucidated. 


warning  of  his  contemporaries.  His  words  may  have  a  more  remote 
reference,  but  must  have  the  nearer  one.  Hence  Isa.  xl. — Ixvi.  is  now 
ascribed  to  a  prophet  or  prophets  of  the  Exile.  The  principle  is  really 
the  same  as  that  which  determines  the  authorship  of  Deut.  xxxiv,  5-12. 
No  one  now  holds  the  view  of  some  Jews,  that  Moses  by  the  spirit  of 
prophecy  wrote  this  himself.  Yet  if  Moses  could  in  a  poem  address  his 
people  as  sinning  and  suffering  through  rebellions  induced  by  their 
prosperity  in  Canaan,  which  they  had  not  entered  when  he  died,  one 
might  as  well  believe  him  to  describe  his  own  decease.  In  both  cases 
we  have  to  suppose  the  mind  of  Moses  transported  to  a  period  when 
he  had  been  removed  by  death,  that  he  might  look  back  upon  and  speak 
of  events  which  when  he  wrote  were  still  future.  Now  in  both  cases 
a  reason  is  lacking.  Every  one  accepts  the  view  that  since  Joshua  or 
Eleazar  was  there  to  write  the  account  of  Moses'  death,  it  is  unlikely 
the  lawgiver  should  have  been  inspired  to  write  it  himself.  Just  so, 
since  Yahweh  inspired  new  prophets  at  every  crisis  of  His  people's 
history,  it  seems  unlikely  that  the  spirit  of  Moses  should  be  transferred 
to,  and  made  at  home  in,  the  circumstances  of  a  distant  generation,  in 
order  to  deliver  to  it  a  message  which  could  have  been  made  known  by 
a  prophet  to  whom  the  time  was  present.  Neither  Kamphausen  nor 
Oettli  nor  Dillmann  nor  the  English  expositors  who  accept  the  non- 


454  THE   BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

As  regards  form  the  poem  is  among  the  finest  specimens 
of  Hebrew  literary  art  which  the  Old  Testament  contains. 
Every  verse  contains  at  least  two  parallel  clauses  of  three 
words  or  word-complexes  each,  and  the  parallelism  in  the 
great  majority  of  instances  is  of  the  "Synonymous"  kind  ; 
that  is  to  say,  ''  the  second  line  enforces  the  thought  of  the 
first  by  repeating,  and  as  it  were  echoing  it  in  a  varied 
form."  ^  But  into  this  as  a  foundation  there  is  wrought  a 
great  deal  of  pleasing  variation.  The  two-clause  verses  are 
varied  by  single  instances  or  couplets  or  triplets  of  four- 
clause  verses ;  while  in  two  cases,  at  the  emphatic  end  of 
sections,  in  vv.  14  and  39,  the  rare  five-clause  verse  is 
found.  Further,  the  synonymous  parallelism  is  relieved  by 
occasional  appearances  of  the  '*  synthetic "  parallelism, 
in  which  "  the  second  line  contains  neither  a  repetition 
nor  a  contrast  to  the  thought  of  the  first,  but  in  different 
ways  supplements  and  completes  it,"  ^  e.g.  vv.  8,  19,  and  27. 

Mosaic  authorship  of  the  song  have  any  doubt  as  to  the  supernatural 
character  of  prophecy.  They  found  upon  observations  as  to  the  manner 
of  Old  Testament  prophecy,  which  ought  to  regulate  interpretation. 

According  to  critical  views  the  ascription  to  Moses  of  the  reception 
and  delivery  of  this  song  was  taken  by  the  Deuteronomist  from  JE. 
Kautzsch  supposes  that  an  editor  to  whom  the  song  was  known  as 
passing  under  the  name  of  Moses  may  have  inserted  it.  Dillmann 
suggests  grounds  for  believing  that  several  prayers  and  poems  ascribed 
to  Moses  (including  Fsalm  xc.)  were  in  circulation  in  prophetic  circles 
in  the  Northern  Kingdom,  and  that  this  one  of  them  v^'as  inserted  here 
as  its  appropriate  place.  The  case  would  be  parallel  to  the  ascription 
of  various  later  Psalms  to  David.  Compare  also  the  discussions  as  to 
the  song  of  Hannah,  i  Sam.  ii. 

The  view  that  a  mistake  as  to  the  Mosaic  authorship,  for  which  the 
writers  of  JE  were  not  responsible,  was  handed  on  in  perfect  good 
faith,  is  compatible  with  the  doctrine  of  inspiration  as  held  by  represen- 
tatives of  the  orthodox  Evangelical  school  in  Germany,  and  by  the  newer 
Evangelicals  in  England.  Cf.  Oettli,  Deuteronomy^  p.  22,  and  Sanday's 
Bampton  Lecture, 

'  Cf.  Driver's  Introduction^  5th  edition,  p.  340. 

'^  Cf.  Driver,  cit.  loc. 


xxxii.]        THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING  OF  MOSES  455 


The  contents  of  the  song  are  in  every  way  worthy 
of  the  origin  assigned  to  it,  and  higher  praise  than 
that  it  is  impossible  to  conceive.  Beginning  with  a  fine 
exordium  caUing  upon  heaven  and  earth  to  give  ear,  the 
inspired  poet  expresses  the  hope  that  his  teaching  may 
fall  with  refreshing  and  fertilising  power  upon  the  hearts 
of  men,  for  he  is  about  to  proclaim  the  name  of  Yahweh, 
to  whom  all  greatness  is  to  be  ascribed.  In  vv.  4  ff.  the 
character  and  dealings  of  Yahweh  are  set  over  against 
those  of  the  people  : — 

"  The  Rock  !  His  deeds  are  perfect, 
For  all  His  ways  are  judgment; 
A  God  of  faithfulness  and  without  falsity, 
Just  and  upright  is  He." 

They,  on  the  contrary,  were  perverse  and  crooked  ;  and, 
acting  corruptly,  they  requited  all  Yahweh's  benefits  with 
rebellion.     To  win  them  from  that  perverseness,  he  calls 
upon  his  people  to  look  back  upon  the  whole  course  of 
God's  dealings  with  them.    Even  before  Israel  had  appeared 
among  the  nations,  Yahweh  had  taken  thought  for  His 
people.      When    He  assigned  their  lands  to  the  various 
nations  of  the  world  He  had  always  before  Him  the  provi- 
sion that  must  be  made  for  the  children  of  Israel,  and  had 
left  a  space  for  them  from  which  none  but  Yahweh  could 
ever  drive  them  out.     For  He  had  the  same  need  of  and 
delight  in  His  people  as    the  nations  had  in   the  lands 
assigned  to  them,  the  lot  of  their  inheritance.     And  not 
only  had  He  thus  prepared  a  place   for  Israel  from  the 
beginning,  but  He  had  led  him   through  the  wilderness, 
through  "  the  waste,  the  howling  desert." 

"He  compassed  him  about,  He  cared  for  him, 
He  kept  him  as  the  apple  of  His  eye." 

To  depict  the  Divine  care  worthily,  he  ventures  upon  a 
simile  of  a  specially  tender  kind,  rare  in  the  Old  Testament, 


456  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

but  to  which  our  Lord's  comparison  of  His  own  brooding 
affection  for  Jerusalem  to  that  of  a  "  hen  gathering  her 
chickens  under  her  wing  "  is  parallel. 

"As  an  eagle  stirs  up  her  nest, 
Flutters  above  her  young ; 

He,  Yahweh,  spread  abroad  His  wings,  He  took  him, 
He  bore  him  upon  His  pinions." 

All  the  hardship  and  the  toil  were  of  God's  appointment 
to  drive  His  beloved  people  upwards  and  onwards. 
Whatever  they  might  think  or  believe  now,  it  was 
Yahweh  alone,  without  companion  or  ally,  who  had  done 
this  for  them,  borne  them  up  through  it,  and  had  bestowed 
upon  them  all  the  luxury  of  the  goodly  land  once  promised 
to  their  fathers.  Even  from  the  rocks  He  had  given  them 
honey,  and  the  rocky  soil  had  produced  the  olive  tree. 
They  had,  too,  all  the  luxuries  of  a  pastoral  people  in 
abundance,  and  the  wheat  and  foaming  wine  which  were 
the  finest  products  of  agriculture. 

In  every  way  their  God  had  blessed  them.  They  had 
all  the  prosperity  which  a  complete  fulfilment  of  the  will 
of  God  could  have  brought,  but  the  result  of  it  all  was 
unfaithfulness  and  rejection  of  Him.  Jeshurun,  the  up- 
right people,  as  the  sacred  singer  in  bitter  irony  calls 
Israel,  waxed  fat  and  wanton.  Instead  of  being  drawn  to 
God  by  His  benefits,  they  had  been  puffed  up  with  conceit 
concerning  their  own  power  and  discernment.  Full  of 
these,  they  had  mingled  idolatrous  rites  with  their  worship 
of  Yahweh.  He  had  suffered  them  to  reap  the  results  of 
their  own  unfaithfulness  in  defeat  at  the  hands  of  their 
foes. 

Instead  of  seeking  the  cause  of  their  ill-success  in 
themselves,  they  had  found  it  in  the  weakness  of  their 
God.  All  the  victories  Yahweh  had  given  them  over  foes 
whose  strength  they  had  feared  were  forgotten,  and  they 
**  despised  the  Rock  of  their  salvation."    They  had  adopted 


xxxii.]         THE  SONG  AND   BLESSING   OF  MOSES  457 

new  and  upstart  deities  whom  their  fathers  had  never 
heard  of,  who  as  they  had  come  up  in  a  day  might 
disappear  in  a  day,  and  neglected  the  Rock  who  begat 
them. 

Yahweh  on  His  part  saw  all  this,  and  scorned  His 
people  and  their  doings.  In  a  vivid  imaginative  picture 
the  poet  represents  Him  as  resolving  to  hide  His  face 
from  them,  to  see  what  their  end  would  be.  Without  the 
shining  of  God's  countenance  there  could  be  but  one  issue 
for  a  people  who  were  so  faithless  and  perverse>  He  will 
recompense  them  for  their  doings. 

"They  made  Me  jealous  with  a  no-God, 
They  vexed  Me  with  their  vain  idols, 
And  I  will  make  them  jealous  with  a  no-people, 
With  a  foolish  nation  will  I  vex  them." 

For  the  fire  of  Divine  wrath  is  kindled  against  them. 
It  burns  in  Yahweh  with  an  all-consuming  power,  and 
fills  the  universe  even  to  the  lowest  depths  of  Sheol. 
Upon  this  sinful  people  it  is  about  to  burst  forth ;  Yahweh 
will  exhaust  all  His  arrows  upon  them.  By  famine  and 
drought;  by  disease  and  the  rage  of  wild  beasts,  and 
of  "  the  crawlers  of  the  dust " ;  by  giving  them  up  to 
their  enemies,  and  by  overwhelming  them  with  terror.  He 
will  destroy  this  people,  *'  the  young  man  and  the  virgin, 
the  suckling  and  the  man  of  grey  hairs  "  alike.  Nothing 
could  save  them,  save  Yahweh's  respect  for  His  own 
name. 

"I  had  said,  I  shall  blow  them  away, 
I  shall  make  their  memory  to  cease  from  among  men  : 
Were  it  not  that  I  feared  vexation  from  the  enemy, 
Lest  their  adversaries  should  misdeem, 
Lest  they  should  say.  Our  hand  is  exalted, 
And  Yahweh  hath  not  done  all  this." 

Nothing  but  that  stood  between  them  and  utter  destruc- 
tion, for  as  a  nation  they  had  no  capacity  for  receiving 


458  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

and  profiting  by  instruction.  If  they  had  been  wise  they 
would  have  known  that  there  was  but  a  step  between 
them  and  death  ;  they  would  have  seen  that  their  deeds 
had  separated  them  from  Yahweh,  and  could  have  but 
one  issue.  Their  frequent  and  shameful  defeats  should 
have  taught  them  that,  for 

"  How  could  one  chase  a  thousand, 
And  two  put  to  flight  ten  thousand, 
Were  it  not  that  their  Rock  had  sold  them. 
And  that  Yahweh  had  delivered   them  up  ? " 

There  was  no  possible  explanation  of  Israel's  defeats 
but  this ;  for  neither  in  the  gods  of  the  heathen  nor  in 
the  heathen  nations  themselves  was  there  anything  to 
account  for  them.  Their  gods  were  not  comparable  to 
the  Rock  of  Israel ;  even  Israel's  enemies  knew  as  much 
as  that.  Israel  might  forget  and  doubt  Yahweh's  power, 
but  those  who  had  been  smitten  before  Him  in  Israel's 
happier  days  knew  that  He  was  above  all  their  gods. 
Nor  was  the  explanation  to  be  sought  in  the  heathen 
nations  themselves.  For  they  were  not  vines  of  Yahweh's 
planting,  but  shoots  from  the  vine  of  Sodom,  tainted  by 
the  soil  of  Gomorrah.  They  were,  perhaps,  in  race,  of 
the  old  Canaanite  stock ;  in  any  case  they  were  morally 
and  spiritually  related  to  them,  and  their  acts  were  such 
as  brought  death  and  destruction  with  them.  In  them- 
selves, consequently,  they  could  not  have  been  strong 
enough  to  discomfit  the  people  of  God  as  they  were  doing, 
nor  could  they  have  been  helped  to  that  by  any  favour  of 
His.  Only  the  determination  of  Yahweh  to  chastise  His 
people  could  explain  Israel's  unhappy  fate  in  war. 

But  Yahweh's  purpose  was  only  to  chastise.  He  was 
in  no  way  finally  forgetful  of  His  chosen,  nor  of  the 
ineradicable  evil  of  their  enemies'  nature.  The  inner 
character  of  men  and  things  is  always  present  to  Him, 
and  their  deeds  are  laid  up  with  Him  as  that  which  must 


xxxii.]        THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING   OF  MOSES  459 

be  dealt  with,  for  it  is  one  of  the  glories  of  Deity  to  sweep 
evil  away  and  to  restore  anything  that  has  good  at  its 
heart.  Recompense  is  God's  great  function  in  the  world, 
and  evil,  however  strong  it  may  be,  and  however  long  it 
may  triumph,  must  one  day  be  dealt  with  by  Him.  It 
is  laid  up  and  sealed 

"Against  the  day  of  vengeance  and  of  recompense, 
Against  the  time  when   their  foot  shall   slip ; 
For  the  day  of  their  calamity  is  at  hand, 
And  hastening  are  the  things  prepared  for  them." 

Without  that,  justice  could  never  be  done  to  the  people 
of  God ;  and  justice  should  be  done  to  them  when  they 
had  been  brought  to  the  verge  of  extinction,  when, 
according  to  the  antique  Hebrew  phrase,  there  "  was 
none  fettered  or  set  free,"  none  left  under  or  over  age. 
Then  when  all  but  the  worst  had  come,  Yahweh  would 
demand,  ''  Where  are  their  gods,  with  whom  they  took 
refuge,  and  who  have  eaten  the  fat  of  their  sacrifices,  and 
drunk  the  wine  of  their  drink  offerings  ? "  He  will 
challenge  them  to  arise  and  help  in  this  last  disastrous 
state  of  their  votaries. 

But  there  will  be  no  response,  and  it  will  be  made  clear 
beyond  all  doubting  that  Yahweh  alone  is  God.  He  will 
declare  Himself,  saying  : — 

"See  now  that  I,   I,  am  He, 
And  there  is  no  god  with   Me  : 
/  kill,  and  /  make  alive ; 
I  wound,   and   I   heal : 
And  there  is  none  that   delivereth  out  of  My  hand." 

In  that  great  day  of  Yahweh's  manifested  glory  He  will 
stand  forth  in  the  fulness  of  avenging  power.  Before 
the  universe  He  will  pledge  Himself  by  the  most  solemn 
oath  to  bring  down  the  pride  of  His  enemies.  In  a 
death-dealing  judgment,  such  as  is  seen  only  when  the 
evil  elements  in   the  world  have  brought  about  a  mere 


46o  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

carnival  of  wickedness,  and  only  universal  death  can 
cleanse,  He  will  recompense  upon  evil-doers  the  evil  they 
have  wrought,  and  to  a  renovated  world  bring  peace. 
There  are  few  finer  or  more  impressive  imaginative 
passages  in  Scripture  than  this  : — 

"For  I  lift  up  My  hand  to  heaven, 
And  say,   (As)  I  live  for  ever, 
If  I  whet  My  gleaming  sword, 
And  My  hand   take  hold  on  judgment, 
I   will  take  vengeance  upon  Mine  enemies, 
And  I  will  recompense  them  that  hate  Me. 
I  will  make  Mine  arrows  drunk  with  blood, 
And   My  sword   shall  devour  flesh, 
With  the  blood    of  the  slain  and  the  captives, 
From  the  chief  of  the  leaders  of  the  enemy." 

With  this  great  vision  of  judgment  the  poet  leaves  his 
people.  For  them  the  first  necessity  evidently  was  that 
they  should  be  assured  that  Yahweh  reigned,  that  evil 
could  not  ultimately  prosper.  With  their  whole  horizon 
dominated  and  illumined  by  this  tremendous  figure  of  the 
ever  living  and  avenging  God,  their  faith  in  the  moral 
government  of  the  world  and  in  the  ultimate  deliverance 
of  their  nation  would  be  restored. 

The  poem  closes  with  a  stanza  in  which  the  seer  and 
singer  calls  upon  the  nations  to  rejoice  because  of 
Yahweh's  people.  The  deliverance  worked  for  them  will 
be  so  great  and  so  memorable  that  even  the  heathen  who 
see  it  must  rejoice.  They  will  see  His  justice  and  His 
faithfulness,  and  will  gain  new  confidence  in  the  stability 
and  the  moral  character  of  the  forces  which  rule  the 
world. 

(B)  The  Blessing  of  Moses 

Deut.  xxxiii. 

Besides  the  farewell  speeches   and  the  farewell  song, 
we   have   in   this   chapter  yet  another  closing  utterance 


xxxiii.]        THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING   OF  MOSES  461 

attributed  to  Moses.     Here,  as  in  the  case  of  the  song,  we 
relegate  critical  matters  to  the  note  below.^ 

We  must  notice  in  the  first  place  the  remarkable 
difference  in  tone  and  outlook  between  the  blessing 
and  the  song  of  Moses.  In  the  latter  evil-doing  and 
approaching  judgment  are  the  burden  ;  here  the  outward 
and  inward  condition  of  Israel  leaves  little  to  be  desired. 
Satisfaction  is  breathed  in  every  line,  for  both  temporally 
and  spiritually  the  state  of  the  people  is  almost  ideally 
happy.  Nowhere  is  there  a  shadow ;  even  on  the 
horizon  there  is  scarcely  a  cloud.  Now  even  an  optimist 
would  need  a  background  of  actual  prosperity  to  draw 
such  a  picture  of  idyllic  happiness  for  any  nation,  and  we 


^  The  blessing  of  Moses  was  certainly  not  written  by  the  author  of 
Deuteronomy:  the  vocabulary  and  the  style  are  different  from  his.  Nor 
probably  was  the  poem  inserted  here  by  him,  but  rather  by  the  final 
editor  of  the  Pentateuch  who  is  believed  to  have  brought  these  closing 
chapters  into  their  present  shape  (cf.  Chap.  XXIV.).  The  authority  on 
which  he  relied  may  have  been  E. 

As  to  the  authorship  of  the  blessing,  Volck  and  Keil  ascribe  it  to 
Moses.  The  great  majority  of  recent  students  regard  it,  at  all  events  in 
its  present  form,  as  post-Mosaic,  on  grounds  drawn  from  features  in  the 
poem,  and  from  the  principles  of  prophetic  exegesis  referred  to  in  the  note 
(p.  452).  Opinions  differ  much  as  to  the  date  to  be  assigned,  varying 
from  the  time  of  David  to  that  of  Jeroboam  II,  The  general  assumption 
is  that  the  blessing  is  the  work  of  a  Northern  Israelite ;  and  the  feeling 
for  the  tribes  of  Levi  and  Judah  which  it  embodies  is  the  chief  indication 
on  which  a  conjecture  can  be  hazarded.  That  would  agree  with  a  date 
later  than  Solomon  and  not  later  than  Jehoshaphat — a  period  when  many 
in  the  Northern  Kingdom  still  looked  with  reverence  to  the  sanctuary  at 
Jerusalem,  and  when  the  Northern  Levites  still  resented  the  intrusion  by 
Jeroboam  of  a  mixed  multitude  into  the  priesthood. 

As  to  form,  and  partly  as  to  contents,  the  blessing  of  Moses  is  modelled 
on  the  blessing  of  Jacob  (Gen.  xlix).  One  conspicuous  difference  is  the 
introduction  into  that  before  us  of  a  prose  heading  before  most  of  the 
sections,  analogous  to  the  headings  which  appear  in  Arabic  poetry  (as 
the  Hamasa)  before  each  quatrain  or  longer  poem.  There  is  no  ground 
for  treating  these  as  later  insertions,  nor  for  separating  other  portions,  as 
some  have  proposed,  as  later  than  the  main  composition. 


462  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

may  therefore  conclude  that  the  poem  has  in  view  one  of 
the  few  halcyon  periods  of  Israel,  before  social  wrongs 
had  ruined  the  yeomen  farmers,  or  war  and  conquest  had 
corrupted  the  powerful.  The  nation  is  as  yet  faithful  to 
Yahweh,  and  possesses  in  peace  the  land  which  He  had 
given  them  to  inherit. 

The  central  part  of  the  poem  is  of  course  the  ten 
blessings  promised  to  the  various  tribes,  but  these  are 
preceded  by  an  introduction  (vv.  2-5),  in  which  the  for- 
mation of  the  people  is  traced  to  Yahweh's  revelation  of 
Himself  and  His  coming  forth  as  their  King.  They  are 
followed  also  by  a  concluding  section  (vv.  26-29),  in 
which  the  God  of  Jeshurun  is  declared  to  be  incomparable, 
and  His  people  are  depicted  as  supremely  happy  under  His 
protecting  care.  The  language  is  in  parts  obscure,  and 
though  the  general  scope  is  always  plain,  yet  there  are 
verses  the  meaning  of  which  can  only  be  conjectured. 
This  is  especially  the  case  in  the  introduction.  Of  the 
five  lines  of  ver.  2,  the  fourth  and  fifth  as  they  stand  are 
hardly  intelligible ;  the  fifth  indeed  is  not  intelligible  at  all. 
In  ver.  3  again,  while  the  first  and  second  clauses  are 
fairly  clear,  the  third  and  fourth  are  as  the}^  stand  un- 
translatable. But  the  general  signification  of  the  intro- 
ductory verses  (2-5)  is  that  the  Divine  revelation  of 
Himself  which  Yahweh  bestowed  upon  His  people  as  He 
came  with  them  from  Sinai,  Paran,  and  Seir  through  the 
wilderness,  and  the  establishment  of  the  covenant  which 
made  Yahweh  Israel's  King,  together  with  the  bestowal  of 
an  inheritance  upon  them,  is  the  foundation  and  beginning 
of  that  happiness  which  is  to  be  described.  It  is  all  traced 
back  to  the  "dawning"  of  God  upon  them.  His  "  shining 
out "  upon  them  from  Sinai,  and  Seir,  and  Paran.  These 
are  named  simply  as  the  most  prominent  points  in  that 
region  whence  the  people  came  out  into  Canaan,  and 
where  the  great  revelation  had  been  bestowed.     God  had 


xxxiii.]       THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING   OF  MOSES  463 


risen  like  the  sun  and  had  shed  forth  light  upon  them 
there,  so  that  they  walked  no  more  in  darkness.  The 
sight  of  God  was,  on  this  view,  the  great  and  fundamental 
fact  in  the  h&story  of  the  chosen  people.  They,  like  all 
who  have  seen  that  great  sight,  were  henceforth  separate 
from  others,  with  different  duties  and  obligations,  with 
hopes  and  desires  and  joys  unknown  to  all  beside.  And 
the  ground  of  this  condescension  on  the  part  of  God  was 
His  love  for  His  people.  He  loved  them,  and  the  saints 
among  them  were  upheld  by  Him.  By  Moses  He  gave 
them  a  law,  which  was  to  hold  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion ;  and  He  had  crowned  His  gifts  to  them  by  becoming 
their  King  when  the  heads  of  the  people  entered  into 
covenant  with  Him. 

Then  follow  the  blessings,  beginning  with  good  wishes 
for  Reuben  as  the  firstborn.  But  the  tribe  is  not  highly 
favoured.  It  is  however  less  severely  dealt  with  than  in 
Jacob's  blessing.  There  instability  and  obscurity  are 
foretold  of  it.  Here  it  would  seem  as  if  the  fortunes  of 
the  tribe  were  at  the  lowest  ebb,  and  a  wish  is  expressed 
that  it  may  not  be  suffered  to  die  out.  From  the  earliest 
times  the  tribe  of  Reuben  seems  to  have  been  tending  to 
decay.  At  the  first  census  taken  under  Moses  the 
number  of  Reubenites  capable  of  bearing  arms  was 
46,500  men  (Numb.  i.  21),  at  the  second  43,730  (Numb, 
xxvi.  7).  Both  passages  are  from  P,  and  consequently 
this  decadence  of  the  tribe  must  have  been  present  to  that 
author's  mind.  In  David's  day  they  had  still  possession 
of  part  of  their  heritage,  but  even  then  their  best  estate 
was  past.  They  had  allowed  many  Moabites  to  remain 
in  the  territory  they  conquered.  These  most  certainly 
caused  trouble  and  gained  the  upper  hand  in  places,  until 
before  the  days  of  Mesa,  king  of  Moab,  as  we  learn  from 
his    inscription/    a    great    part    of    the    cities    formerly 

'  Dillmann.  Deuteronomy,  p.  420. 


464  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Reubenite  were  in  Moabite  or  Gadite  hands.  In  Isaiah 
.XV.  and  xvi.  again,  Heshbon  and  Elealeh,  cities  still 
Reubenite  in  Mesa's  day,  appear  as  Moabite,  so  that  the 
bulk  of  the  territory  assigned  to  the  tribe  must  have  been 
lost.^  This  record  confirms  the  view  that  the  blessing 
was  written  between  Rehoboam  and  Jehoshaphat,  and 
throws  light  upon  our  verse : — 

"May  Reuben  live,  and  not  die, 
So  that  his  men  be  few." 

The  blessing  of  Judah  follows,  but  in  contrast  with  the 
great  destiny  foretold  for  this  tribe  in  Jacob's  blessing 
what  is  here  said  is  strangely  short  and  unenthusiastic : — 

"Hear,  O  Yahweh,  Judah's  voice, 
And  bring  him  to  his  people ; 

With  his  hands  has  he  striven  for  it  (his  people) ; 
And  a  help  against  his  enemies  be  thou." 

Some  whose  opinions  we  are  bound  to  respect,  as  Oettli, 
think  this  refers  merely  to  Judah's  being  appointed  to  lead 
the  van  of  the  invasion,  as  in  Judges  i.  i  and  xx.  8. 
In  that  case  we  should  have  to  conceive  that  on  some 
occasion  Judah  was  absent  leading  the  conquest,  and  got 
into  dangerous  circumstances,  which  are  here  referred  to. 
But  it  would  seem  that  any  such  temporary  danger  could 
hardly  have  a  place  here.  In  all  the  other  blessings 
permanent  conditions  only  are  regarded ;  and  the  sole 
historical  fact  we  really  know  that  would  explain  this 
reference  is  the  division  of  the  kingdom.  But,  it  may  be 
said,  all  critics  agree  that  the  author  of  the  blessing  is  a 
Northern  Israelite  :  now  we  cannot  suppose  a  Northern 
man  to  speak  in  this  way  of  Judah,  for  it  was  the  ten 
tribes  that  revolted  from  the  house  of  David,  not  Judah 
from  them.     We  must  remember,  however,  that   though 

*  Baethgen's  Riehm,  i/rt«^wor/fr^wc/?,  p.  1321. 


xxxiii.]         THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING   OF  MOSES  4^5 


that  is  how  Scripture,  which  in  this  matter  represents  the 
Southern  view,  regards  the  matter,  the  Northern  Israelites 
could  look  at  the  separation  from  another  standpoint. 
To  those  even  who  were  favourable  to  the  Davidic  house, 
and  regretted  the  folly  of  Rehoboam,  it  might  seem 
that  Judah  had  first  broken  away  from  the  kingdom  as 
united  under  Saul;  and  the  revolt  under  Jeroboam 
would  appear  to  be  only  a  resumption  of  the  older  state 
of  things,  from  which  Judah  had  again  separated  itself. 
What  circumstance  can  be  referred  to  in  the  request  to 
hear  Judah's  voice  cannot  now  be  ascertained ;  but  it  is 
not  at  all  unlikely  that  some  indication  of  a  wish  for 
reunion,  perhaps  expressed  in  some  public  prayer,  may 
have  been  given  in  the  first  period  of  the  separation. 
The  rest  of  the  verse  would  fit  this  hypothesis  as  well  as 
it  fits  the  other,  and  I  think  with  the  light  we  at  present 
have  we  must  hold  the  reference  to  be  as  suggested. 

With  the  eighth  verse  the  blessing  of  Levi  (one  of  the 
two  most  heartfelt  and  sympathetic)  begins.  In  it  Yahweh 
is  addressed  thus  : — 

"Thy  Urim   and    thy  Thummim   be   to   the  men  (J.e.   tribe)   of  thy 
devoted  one  {i.e.  Moses  or  Aaron), 
Whom  thou  didst  prove  at  Massah, 
With  whom  thou  didst  strive  at  the  waters  of  Meribah." 

In  the  last  lines  the  relative  pronoun  is  ambiguous,  as 
it  may  refer  either  to  "men,"  for  which  in  Hebrew  we 
have  the  collective  singular  Hsh^  or  to  "  thy  devoted  one." 
The  last  is  the  more  probable ;  but  in  either  case  there 
is  a  superficial  discrepancy  here  between  the  historical 
books  and  this  statement.  In  Exod.  xvii.  1-7,  as  well 
as  in  Deuteronomy  itself,  it  is  the  people  who  strove  with 
Moses  and  proved  or  tempted  Yahweh.  On  this  account 
some  would  have  us  believe  that  a  different  account  of  the 
events  at  Massah  and  Meribah  was  in  this  writer's  mind. 

30 


466  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

But  that  is  the  result  of  a  mere  itch  for  discovering  dis- 
crepancies. It  lies  in  the  very  nature  of  the  case  that 
there  should  be  another  side  to  it.  The  beginning  was 
with  the  people ;  but  just  as  the  wandering  in  the  wilder- 
ness is  said  to  have  been  meant  by  God  to  prove  Israel, 
so  this  insubordination  of  the  people  was  meant  to  prove 
Moses  or  Aaron,  and  their  failure  to  stand  the  proof  made 
Yahweh  strive  with  them.  The  verse,  then,  founds  Levi's 
claim  to  possess  the  chief  oracle  and  to  instruct  Israel 
first  of  all  upon  their  connection  with  Moses  or  Aaron,  or 
both,  since  they  had  been  exceptionally  tried  and  had 
proved  their  devotion.  The  next  verse,  then,  goes  on 
to  found  it  also  on  the  faithfulness  of  the  Levites,  when 
they  were  called  upon  by  Moses  (Exod.  xxxii.  26-29) 
to  punish  the  people  for  their  worship  of  the  golden  calf. 
In  vv.  27  and  29  of  that  chapter  we  find  the  same  phrases, 

9  "Who  {i.e.  the  tribe)  said  unto  his  father  and  to  his  mother, 
I  have  not  seen  him ; 

Who  recognised  not  his  brother,  and  would  know  nought  of  his  son  ; 
For  they  kept  Thy  commandment, 
And  kept  guard  over  Thy  covenant." 

Being  such — 

10  "Let  them  teach  Jacob  Thy  judgments. 
And  Israel  Thy  Torah ; 
Let  them  put  incense  in  Thy  nostrils, 
And  whole  burnt-offerings  upon  Thine  altars." 

Here  we  have  the  whole  priestly  duties  assigned  to  the 
Levites.  They  are  to  perform  judicial  functions ;  to  give 
Torah,  or  instruction,  by  means  of  the  Urim  and  Thummim 
and  otherwise ;  to  offer  incense  in  the  Holy  Place,  and 
sacrifices  in  the  court  of  the  Temple.  As  early  as  this, 
therefore  (on  any  supposition  we  need  regard,  long  before 
Deuteronomy),  we  find  the  Levites  fully  established  as 


xxxiii.]         THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING   OF  MOSES  467 

the  priestly  tribe.  Before  the  earhest  writing  prophets 
this  was  so — a  fact  of  the  greatest  importance  for  the 
history  of  Israelite  religion.  The  remaining  verse  beseeches 
Yahweh  to  accept  the  work  of  Levi's  hands,  and  to  smite 
down  his  enemies.  Evidently  when  this  was  written 
special  enmity  was  being  shown  to  this  tribe ;  and,  as 
has  been  said  already,  the  religious  proceedings  of 
Jeroboam  I.  would  be  sufficient  to  call  forth  such  a  cry 
to  Yahweh. 

In  ver.  12  the  tribe  of  Benjamin  is  dealt  with,  and  it 
is  depicted  as  specially  blessed  by  the  Divine  favour  and 
the  Divine  presence.  Yahweh  covers  him  all  the  day 
long,  and  dwells  between  his  shoulders.  There  can 
hardly  be  a  doubt  that  the  reference  is  to  the  situation 
of  the  Temple  at  Jerusalem,  on  the  hill  of  Zion,  towards 
the  loftier  boundary  of  Benjamin's  territory. 

Verses  13-17  contain  the  blessing  of  Joseph,  i.e.  of  the 
two  tribes  Ephraim  and  Manasseh. 

13  "Blessed  of  Yahweh  be  his  land 

By  the  precious  things  of  heaven  from  above, 
By  the  deep  which  crouches  beneath  ; 

14  "  By  the  precious  things  of  the  sun, 

And  the  precious  things  of  the  moons ; 

15  "And  by  the  (precious  things  of  the)  tops  of  the  ancient  mountains 

And  by  the  precious  things  of  the  everlasting  hills ; 

16  "And  by  the  precious  things  of  the  earth  and  its  fulness. 

And  may  the  good-will  of  Him  that  dwelt  in  the  bush 

Come  upon  Joseph's  head, 

And  upon  the  top  of  the  head  of  the  crowned  among  his  brethren. 

17  "May  the  firstborn  of  his  ox  be  glorious; 

And  the  horns  thereof  like  the  horns  of  the  wild-ox ; 

With  them    may  he   gore  the  peoples,  even   all   the  earth's  ends 

together. 
These  {i.e.  thus  blessed)  are  the  myriads  of  Ephraim, 
And  these  the  thousands  of  Manasseh." 

Supreme  fertility  is  to  be  his,  and  the  favour  of  Yahweh  is 
to  rest  upon  him  as  the  kingly  tribe  in  Israel.     The  curious 


468  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 


phrase  at  the  beginning  of  the  seventeenth  verse  has  been 
supposed  to  be  a  reference  to  some  individual,  Joshua, 
Jeroboam  II.,  or  to  the  Ephraimite  kings  as  a  whole. 
But  the  subject  of  the  blessing  is  the  Josephite  tribes,  and 
there  seems  to  be  no  good  reason  why  the  reference 
should  be  changed  here.  It  cannot,  therefore,  refer  to  less 
than  a  whole  tribe,  and  as  according  to  Gen.  xlviii.  14 
Ephraim  received  the  blessing  of  the  firstborn,  it  must 
be  Ephraim  which  is  Joseph's  firstborn  ox.  This  view 
is  confirmed  by  the  last  clause  of  the  verse,  in  which  the 
myriads  of  Ephraim  are  spoken  of,  and  only  the  thousands 
of  Manasseh.  Obviously  this  must  refer  to  times  hke 
those  of  Omri,  when  the  Israelite  kingship  was  in  its  first 
youthful  energy,  and  was  extending  conquest  on  every 
hand. 

The  benedictions  which  remain  are  addressed  to 
Zebulun,  Issachar,  Gad,  Dan,  Naphtali,  and  Asher.  They 
need  little  comment  beyond  close  translation. 

18  "And   of  Zebulun  he  said, 

Rejoice,  Zebulun,  in  thy  going  out ; 
And,  Issachar,  in  thy  tents. 

19  "They  shall  call  the  peoples  unto  the  mountain; 

They  shall  offer  sacrifices  of  righteousness  : 
For  they  shall  suck  the  abundance  of  the  seas, 
And  the  hidden  treasures  of  the  sand." 

The  territory  of  Zebulun  stretched  from  the  Sea  of 
Galilee  to  the  Mediterranean,  probably  quite  down  to 
the  sea  near  Akko,  in  any  case  near  enough  to  give  it  an 
active  share  in  the  sea  traffic.  Issachar,  whose  tribal  land 
was  the  plain  of  Esdraelon,  also  shares  in  it ;  but  the 
contrast  between  "  thy  going  out "  and  "  thy  tents " 
implies  that  Zebulun  took  the  more  active  part  in  the 
traffic.  The  reference  in  verse  19,  clauses  a  and  b,  is 
obscure.  As  the  Septuagint  reads  **  they  shall  destroy  " 
instead  of  "  unto  the  mountain,"  the  text  may  be  corrupt. 


xxxiii.]         THE  SONG  AND  BLESSING   OF  MOSES  469 

It  may  perhaps  be  an  allusion  to  the  sacrificial  feasts  at 
inaugurated  fairs  to  which  surrounding  peoples  were 
called,  as  Stade  suggests. 

20  "And  of  Gad  he  said, 

Blessed  be  the  enlarger  of  Gad  : 

He  dwelleth  as  a  lioness, 

And  teareth  the  arm,  yea,  the  crown  of  the  head. 

21  "And  he  looked  out  the  first  part  for  himself, 

Because  there  a  (tribal)  ruler's  portion  lay  ready ; 
And  he  came  with  the  heads  of  the  people, 
He  executed  the  justice  of  Yahweh, 
And  His  judgments  in  company  with  Israel." 

At  this  time  Gad  was  in  possession  of  a  wide  territory, 
and  was  famed  for  courage  and  success  in  war.  His 
foresight  in  choosing  the  first  of  the  conquered  land  as  a 
worthy  tribal  portion  is  praised,  and  his  faithfulness  in 
carrying  out  his  bargain  to  accompany  the  nation  in  its 
attack  on  the  west  Jordan  land. 

22  "And  of  Dan   he   said, 

Dan   is  a  lion's  whelp, 
Leaping  forth  from  Bashan." 

This  does  not  mean  that  Dan's  territory  was  Bashan, 
but  only  that  his  attack  was  as  fierce  and  unexpected  as 
that  of  a  lion  leaping  forth  from  the  crevices  and  caves  of 
the  rocks  in  Bashan. 

23  "And  of  Naphtali  he  said, 

O  Naphtali,  sated  with  favour, 

And  full  of  the  blessing  of  Yahweh  : 

Possess  thou  the  sea  and  the  south." 

The  soil  in  the  territory  of  Naphtali  was  specially 
fruitful,  in  the  region  of  Huleh  and  on  the  shore  of  the 
Sea  of  Gennesaret.  These  are  the  sea  and  the  hot  south 
part  which  the  tribe  is  called  upon  to  take  as  a  posses- 
sion, and  because  of  which  the  favour  of  Yahweh  and 
His  blessing  specially  rested  upon  it. 

24  "And  of  Asher  he  said. 

Blessed  above  children  be  Asher; 


470  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 


May  he  be  the  favoured  of  his  brethren, 
And  dip  his  feet  in  oil. 

25  "  Iron  and  brass  (be)  thy  bars  ; 

And  as  thy  days  (so  may)  thy  strength  (be)." 

The  last  line  is  extremely  doubtful.  The  word  trans- 
lated "  thy  strength "  is  really  not  known,  and  that 
meaning  probably  implies  another  reading ;  *'  thy  bars " 
in  the  previous  line  is  also  doubtful.  The  reference  to 
oil  probably  implies  that  the  olive  tree  was  specially 
fruitful,  in  the  country  inhabited  by  Asher,  but  why  he 
should  be  specially  favoured  of  his  brethren  can  now 
hardly  be  conjectured. 

In  the  concluding  verses  we  have  an  exaltation  of 
Israel's  God  and  of  His  people.  Speaking  out  of  the 
time  when  Israel  had  driven  out  its  enemies  and  was  in 
full  and  undisturbed  possession  of  its  heritage  (ver.  28), 
the  poet  declares  to  Jeshurun  how  incomparable  God  is. 
He  rides  upon  the  heaven  to  bring  help  to  them,  and 
He  comes  in  the  clouds  with  majesty.  The  God  of  old 
time  is  Israel's  refuge  or  dwellin'g,  covering  him  from 
above,  and  beneath,  i.e.  on  the  earth.  His  everlasting 
arms  bear  His  people  up  in  their  weariness,  and  shelter 
them  there  against  all  foes.  He  has  proved  this  by 
thrusting  out  before  them,  and  by  commanding  them  to 
destroy,  their  enemies. 

28  "And  so  Israel  came  to  dwell  in  safety, 

The  fountain  of  Jacob  alone, 
In  a  land  of  corn  and  wine ; 
Yea,  His  heavens  drop  down  dew. 

29  "Happy  art  thou,  O  Israel: 

"Who  is  like  unto  thee  ? 

A  people  saved  by  Yahweh, 

The  shield  of  thy  help 

And  the  sword  of  thy  majesty ! 

Thine  enemies  shall  feign  friendship  to  thee  ; 

And  thou  shalt  tread  upon  their  high  places." 


CHAPTER   XXVI 

MOSES'   CHARACTER  AND  DEATH 

IT  has  been  often  said,  and  it  has  even  become  a 
principle  of  the  critical  school,  that  the  historical 
notices  in  the  earlier  documents  of  the  Old  Testament 
represent  nothing  but  the  ideas  current  at  the  time 
when  they  were  written.  Whether  they  depict  an 
Abraham,  a  Jacob,  or  a  Moses,  all  they  really  tell  us  is 
the  kind  of  character  which  at  such  times  was  held  to  be 
heroic.  In  this  way  the  value  of  the  historic  parts  of 
Deuteronomy  have  been  called  in  question,  and  we  have 
been  told  that  all  we  can  gather  from  them  about  Moses 
is  the  kind  of  character  which  the  pious,  in  the  age  of 
Manasseh,  would  feel  justified  in  attributing  to  their  great 
religious  hero.  But  it  is  manifestly  unfair  to  estimate  the 
statements  of  men  who  write  in  good  faith,  as  if  they  were 
only  projecting  their  own  desires  and  prejudices  upon  a 
past  which  is  absolutely  dark.  It  may  be  true  that  such 
writers  might  be  unwilling  to  narrate  stories  concerning  the 
great  men  of  the  past  which  were  inconsistent  with  the 
esteem  in  which  they  were  held ;  but  it  is  much  more 
certain  that  their  narratives  will  represent  the  tradition  and 
the  current  knowledge  of  their  time  regarding  the  heroes  of 
their  race.  Unless  this  be  true,  no  reliance  could  be  placed 
upon  anything  but  absolutely  contemporary  documents  ; 
even  these  would  be  open  to  suspicion,  if  the  human  mind 
were  so  lawless  as  to  have  no  scruple  in  filling  up  all  gaps 
in    its   knowledge    by    imaginations.      We    must  protest, 

471 


472  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

therefore,  against  the  notion  that  what  J  and  E  and  D 
tell  us  concerning  the  life  and  character  of  Moses  must  be 
discounted  in  any  effort  we  make  to  represent  to  ourselves 
the  life  and  thought  of  that  great  leader  of  Israel.  They 
tell  us  much  more  than  what  was  thought  fitting  for  a 
leader  of  the  people  in  the  ninth  and  eighth  and  seventh 
centuries  B.C.  They  tell  us  what  was  believed  in  those 
times  about  Moses  ;  and  much  of  what  was  believed  about 
him  must  have  rested  upon  good  authority,  upon  entirely 
reliable  tradition,  or  upon  previous  written  narratives 
concerning  him. 

Up  till  recently  it  was  held,  by  men  as  eminent  even  as 
Reuss,  that  writing  was  unknown  in  the  days  of  Moses, 
and  that  for  long  afterwards  oral  tradition  alone  could 
be  a  source  of  knowledge  of  the  past.  But  recent  dis- 
coveries have  shown  that  this  is  an  entire  mistake.  Long 
before  Moses  writing  was  a  common  accomphshment  in 
Canaan ;  and  it  seems  almost  ridiculous  to  suppose  that 
the  man  who  left  his  mark  so  indelibly  upon  this  nation 
should  have  been  ignorant  of  an  art  with  which  every 
master  of  a  village  or  two  was  thoroughly  conversant. 
Moreover  the  fact  that  the  same  root  (k-t-b)  occurs  in 
every  Semitic  tongue  with  the  meaning  *'to  write,"  would 
seem  to  indicate  that  before  their  separation  from  one 
another  the  art  of  writing  was  known  to  all  the  Semitic 
tribes.  The  new  facts  enormously  strengthen  that  pro- 
bability, and  make  the  arguments  advanced  by  those  who 
hold  the  opposite  view  look  even  absurd.  But  if  writing 
were  known  and  practised  in  Moses'  day  in  Canaan,  it 
would  be  marvellous  if  many  of  the  great  events  of  the 
early  days  had  not  been  recorded.  It  would  be  still 
more  marvellous  if  the  comparatively  late  writings,  which 
alone  we  have  at  our  disposal  had  not  embodied  and 
absorbed  much  older  documents. 

But  for  still  another  reason  the  critical  dictum  must  be 


MOSES'    CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  473 


held  to  be  false.     Applied  in  other  fields  and  in  regard  to 
other  times,  this  same  principle  would  deprive  us  of  almost 
every  character  which  has  been  considered  the  glory  of 
humanity.      Zarathustra    and    Buddha    have   ahke   been 
sacrificed  to  this  prejudice,  and  there  are  men  living  who 
say  that  we  know  so  Httle  about  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ 
that  it  is  doubtful  whether  He  ever  existed.     A  method 
which   produces  such  results  must  be  false.     The  great 
source  of  progress  and  reform  has  always  been  some  man 
possessed  by  an  idea  or  a  principle.     Even  in  our  own 
days,  when  the  press  and  the  facilities  for  communication 
have  given  general  tendencies  a  power  to  realise  them- 
selves which  they  never  had  in  the  world's  history  before, 
great  men  are  the  moving  factors  in  all  great  changes.     In 
earlier  ages  this  was  still  more  the  case.     It  is  an  utterly 
unjustifiable  scepticism  which  makes  men  contradict  the 
grateful  recollection  of  mankind,  in  regard  to  those  who 
have    raised    and    comforted    humanity.       Through     all 
obscurities  and  confusions  we  can  reach  that  Indian  Prince 
for  whom  the  sight  of  human  misery  embittered  his  own 
brilliant   and   enjoyable    life.      We    refuse    to    give    up 
Zarathustra,    though    his    story    is    more    obscure    and 
entangled  than  that  of  almost  any  other  great  leader  of 
mankind.     Especially    in   a   history    Hke   that    of   Israel, 
which  purports  to  have  been  guided  in  a  special  manner 
by    revelations    of  the  will    of  God,  the  individual    man 
filled  with  God's  spirit   is    quite    indispensable.     Even  if 
mythical  elements  in  the  story  could  be  proved,  that  would 
not  shake  our  faith   in  the  existence   of  Moses;   for  as 
Steinthal,   who  holds  the  very  "  advanced "  opinion  that 
solar  myths  have  strayed  into  the  history  of  Moses,  wisely 
says,  it  is  quite  as  possible  to  distinguish  between    the 
mythical  and  the  historical  Moses  as  it  is  to  distinguish 
between    the  historical    Charlemagne    and    the   mythical. 
Because  of  the  general  reliability  of  tradition   regarding 


474  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

great  men  therefore,  and  because  also  of  the  proofs  we 
have  that  writing  was  common  before  Moses'  day,  we  need 
not  burden  ourselves  with  the  assumption  or  the  fear  that 
the  Deuteronomic  character  of  Moses  may  be  unreliable. 

But  in  endeavouring  to  set  forth  this  conception  of  the 
character  of  Moses,  we  cannot  confine  ourselves  to  what 
appears  in  this  book.  It  is  generally  acknowledged  that 
the  author  had  at  least  the  Yahwist  and  the  Elohist 
documents  in  their  entirety  before  him,  and  regarded  them 
with  respect,  not  to  say  reverence.  Consequently  we  must 
believe  that  he  accepted  what  they  said  of  Moses  as  true. 
The  only  document  in  the  Pentateuch  that  he  may  not 
have  known  in  any  shape  was  the  Priest  Codex,  but  that 
makes  no  attempt  to  depict  the  inner  or  outer  life  of  Moses. 
All  the  personal  life  and  colour  in  the  Biblical  narrative 
belongs  to  the  other  sources.  For  a  personal  estimate, 
therefore,  we  lose  little  by  excluding  P.  Only  one  other 
cause  of  suspicion  in  regard  to  the  historical  parts  of 
Deuteronomy  could  arise.  If  it,  comparatively  modern  as 
it  is,  contained  much  that  was  new,  if  it  revealed  aspects 
of  character  for  which  no  authority  was  quoted,  and  of 
which  there  was  no  trace  in  the  earlier  narratives,  there 
might  be  reasonable  doubt  whether  these  new  details  were 
the  product  of  imagination.  But  there  is  very  little  more 
in  Deuteronomy  than  there  is  in  the  historical  parts  of  the 
other  books,  though  the  older  narratives  are  repeated  with 
a  vivid  and  insistive  pathos  which  almost  seems  to  make 
them  new. 

Combining  then  what  the  Deuteronomist  himself  says 
with  what  the  Yahwist  and  Elohist  documents  contain,  we 
find  that  the  claim  usually  made  for  Moses,  that  he  was 
the  founder  of  an  entirely  new  religion,  is  not  sustained. 
Again  and  again  it  is  asserted  that  Yahweh  had  been  the 
God  of  their  fathers,  of  Abraham,  Isaac,  and  Jacob — so 
that   Moses   was    simply  the   renewer  of  a  higher  faith 


MOSES'   CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  475 


which  for  a  time  had  been  corrupted.     Some  have  even 
asserted  that  there  had  been  all  down  the  ages  to  Moses 
the  memory  of  a  primeval  revelation.     But  if  there  ever 
was  such  a  thing,  we  learn  from  Josh.  xxiv.  2,  a  verse 
acknowledged   to   be  from   the    Elohist,    that   that  ''  fair 
beginning   of  a    time"   had   been    entirely   eclipsed,    for 
Terah,  the   father   of  Abraham,  had  served  other   gods 
beyond  the  flood.     Abraham,  therefore,  rather  than  Moses, 
is   regarded  as  the   founder  of  the  religion  of  Yahweh. 
Whether  the  word  Yahweh  (Exod.  vi.  3)  was  known  or  not 
makes  little  difference,  for  all  our  four  authorities  teach 
that  Moses'  work  was  the  revival  of  faith  in  that  which 
Abraham,  Isaac,  and  Jacob  had  believed.     But  the  bulk 
of  the  people  would  appear  to  have  been  ignorant  regard- 
ing the  God  of  their  fathers ;  and  probably  the  conception 
which   Deuteronomy   shares   with   J   and    E    is   that   in 
Moses'  day  Yahweh  was  the  special  God  of  a  small  circle, 
perhaps  of  the  tribe  of  Levi,  among  whom  a  more  spiritual 
conception  of  God  than  was  common  among  their  country- 
men   had    either    been    retained,    or   had    arisen    anew. 
Probably  then  we  ought  to  conceive  the  circumstances  of 
Moses'   early  hfe  somewhat  in   this  way.     A  number  of 
Semitic  tribes,  more  or  less  nearly  related  to  each  other 
and    to  Edom  and  Moab,  had  settled  in  Egypt  as  semi- 
agricultural  nomads.     At  first   they  were   tolerated  ;  but 
they  were  now  being  worn  down  and  oppressed  by  forced 
labour  of  the  most  brutal  sort.     Either  a  tribe  or  a  clan 
among  them  had  the  germs  of  a  purer  conception  of  God, 
and    in    this    tribe    or    clan    Moses,  the  deliverer  of  his 
people,   was  born.     Providentially  he  escaped   the  death 
which  awaited  all  Israelite  boys  in  those  days,  and  grew 
up  in   the  camp  of  the  enemies  of  his  people.     By  this 
means  he   received  all  the  culture  that  the    best  of  the 
oppressors   had,    while    the    tie    to    Israel    was    neither 
obscured  nor  weakened    in    his  mind.     At   the  court  of 


476  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Pharaoh  he  could  not  fail  to  acquire  some  notions  of 
state-craft,  and  he  must  have  seen  that  the  first  step 
towards  anything  great  for  his  people  must  be  their  union 
and  consolidation.  But  his  earliest  effort  on  their  behalf 
showed  that  he  had  not  really  considered  and  weighed  the 
magnitude  of  his  task.  Killing  an  Egyptian  oppressor 
might  conceivably  have  served  as  a  signal  for  revolt. 
But  in  point  of  fact  it  frustrated  any  plans  Moses  might 
have  had  for  the  good  of  his  people,  and  drove  him  into 
the  wilderness.  Here  the  germs  of  various  thoughts 
which  education  and  experience  of  life  had  deposited  in 
his  mind  had  time  to  develop  and  grow.  According  to 
the  narrative,  it  was  only  at  the  end  of  his  long  sojourn 
in  Midian  that  he  had  direct  revelation  from  God.  But 
amid  the  wide  and  awful  solitudes  of  that  wilderness  land, 
as  General  Gordon  said  of  himself  in  the  kindred  soHtudes 
of  the  Soudan,  he  learned  himself  and  God.  Whatever 
deposits  of  higher  faith  he  had  received  from  his  family, 
no  doubt  the  long,  silent  broodings  inseparable  from  a 
shepherd's  life  had  increased  and  vivified  it.  Every 
possible  aspect  of  it  must  have  been  reckoned  with,  all 
its  consequences  explored  ;  and  his  great  and  solitary  soul, 
we  may  be  sure,  had  many  a  time  let  down  soundings 
into  the  deeps  which  were,  as  yet,  dark  to  him.  And 
then — for  it  is  to  souls  that  have  yearned  after  Him  in 
the  travail  of  intellectual  and  spiritual  longing  that  God 
gives  His  great  and  splendid  revelations — Yahweh  revealed 
Himself  in  the  flame  of  the  bush,  and  gave  him  the  final 
assurance  and  the  first  impulse  for  his  life's  work.  It  is 
a  touch  of  reality  in  the  narrative  which  can  hardly  be 
mistaken,  that  it  represents  Moses  as  shrinking  from  the 
responsibility  which  his  call  must  lay  upon  him.  Behind 
the  few  and  simple  objections  in  the  narrative,  we  must 
picture  to  ourselves  a  whole  world  of  thoughts  and 
feelings  into  which  the  call  of  God  had  brought  tumult 


MOSES'   CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  477 

and  confusion.  One  would  need  to  be  a  dry-as-dust 
pedant  not  to  see  here,  as  in  the  case  of  Isaiah's  call, 
the  triumphant  issue  of  a  long  conflict  and  the  decisive 
moment  of  a  victory  over  self,  which  had  had  already 
many  stages  of  defeat  and  only  partial  success.  It  is 
perennially  true  to  human  nature  and  to  the  Divine 
dealings  with  human  nature,  that  help  from  on  high 
comes  to  establish  and  touch  to  finer  issues  that  which 
the  true  man  has  striven  for  with  all  his  powers. 

Enlightened  and  assured  by  this  great  revelation  of 
God,  Moses  left  the  quiet  of  the  desert  to  undertake  an 
extraordinarily  difficult  task.  He  had  to  weld  jealous 
tribes  into  a  nation ;  he  had  to  rouse  men  whose  courage 
had  been  broken  by  slavery  and  cruelty  to  undertake  a 
dangerous  revolt ;  and  he  had  to  prepare  for  the  march  of 
a  whole  population,  burdened  with  invalids  and  infants, 
the  feeble  and  the  old,  through  a  country  which  even 
to-day  tries  all  but  the  strongest.  These  things  had  to  be 
done  ;  and  the  mere  fact  that  they  were  accomplished 
would  be  inexplicable,  without  the  domination  of  a  great 
personality  inspired  by  great  ideas  of  a  religious  kind. 
For,  in  antiquity,  the  only  bond  able  to  hold  incongruous 
elements  together  in  one  nationality  was  religion.  With 
the  people  whom  Moses  had  to  lead  the  necessity  would 
be  the  same,  or  even  greater.  But  the  political  work 
which  must  have  preceded  any  common  action  likewise 
demanded  a  great  personality.  Though  no  doubt  a 
common  misery  might  silence  jealousies  and  make  men 
eager  to  listen  to  any  promises  of  deliverance,  yet  many 
troublesome  negotiations  must  have  been  carried  through 
successfully  before  these  sentences  could  have  been  written 
with  truth  :  "  And  Moses  and  Aaron  went  and  gathered 
together  all  the  elders  of  the  children  of  Israel,  and  the 
people  believed,  and  bowed  their  heads  and  worshipped." 

Many  conjectures  have  been  hazarded  as  to  what  the 


478  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

centre  of  Moses'  message  at  this  time  really  was.  Some, 
like  Stade,  bring  it  down  to  this,  that  Yahweh  was  the  God 
of  Israel.  Others  add  to  this  somewhat  meagre  statement 
another  equally  meagre,  that  Israel  was  the  people  of 
Yahweh.  But  unless  the  character  of  Yahweh  had  been 
previously  expounded  to  the  people,  there  seems  little  in 
these  two  declarations  to  excite  any  enthusiasm  or  to 
kindle  faith.  The  mere  fact  of  inducing  the  tribes  to  put 
all  other  gods  aside  is  insufficient  to  account  for  any  of 
the  results  that  followed,  if  to  Moses  Yahweh  had  re- 
mained simply  a  tribal  God,  of  the  same  type  as  the  gods 
of  the  Canaanites.  On  the  other  hand,  if  he  had  risen  to 
the  conception  of  God  as  a  spirit,  of  Yahweh  as  the  only 
living  God,  as  the  inspirer  and  defender  of  moral  life,  or 
even  if  he  had  made  any  large  approach  to  these  concep- 
tions, it  is  easy  to  understand  how  the  hearts  of  the  mass 
of  the  people  were  stirred  and  filled,  even  though  things 
so  high  were  not,  by  the  generality,  thoroughly  understood 
or  long  retained.  But  the  hearts  of  all  the  chosen,  the 
spiritually  elect,  would  be  moved  by  them  as  the  leaves 
are  moved  by  the  wind.  These,  with  Moses  at  their 
head,  formed  a  nucleus  which  bore  the  people  on  through 
all  their  trials  and  dangers,  and  gradually  leavened  the 
mass  to  some  extent  with  the  same  spirit. 

Even  after  this  had  been  accomplished,  the  main  work 
remained  to  be  done.  We  cannot  agree  indeed  with  many 
writers  who  seem  to  think  that  the  whole  life  of  the 
Israelite  people  was  started  anew  by  Moses.  That  would 
involve  that  every  regulation  for  the  most  trivial  detail  of 
ordinary  life  was  directly  revealed,  and  that  Moses  made  a 
tabula  rasa  of  their  minds,  rubbing  out  all  previous  laws 
and  customs,  and  writing  a  God-given  constitution  in  their 
place.  Obviously,  that  could  hardly  be  ;  but  still  a  task 
very  different,  yet  almost  as  difficult,  remained  for  Moses 
after   his  first   success.     His   final    aim  was    to    make  a 


MOSES'   CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  479 

virtually  new  nation  out  of  the  Hebrew  tribes ;  and  their 
whole  constitution  and  habits  had,  consequently,  to  be 
revised  from  the  new  religious  standpoint.  He  and  the 
nation  alike  had  inherited  a  past,  and  it  was  no  part  of 
his  mission  to  delete  that.  Reforms,  to  be  stable,  must 
have  a  root  in  the  habits  and  thoughts  of  the  people 
whom  they  concern.  Moses  would,  consequently,  uproot 
nothing  that  could  be  spared ;  he  would  plant  nothing 
anew  which  was  already  flourishing,  and  was  compatible 
with  the  new  and  dominant  ideas  he  had  introduced. 
A  great  mass  of  the  laws  and  customs  of  the  Hebrews 
must  have  been  good,  and  suitable  to  the  stage  of  moral 
advancement  they  had  reached  before  Moses  came  to 
them.  Any  measure  of  civilised  life  involves  so  much 
as  that.  Another  great  mass,  while  lying  outside  of  the 
religious  sphere,  must  have  been  at  least  compatible  with 
Yahwism.  All  laws  and  customs  coming  under  these  two 
categories,  Moses  would  naturally  adopt  as  part  of  the 
legislation  of  the  new  nation,  and  would  stamp  them  with 
his  approval  as  being  in  aecord  with  the  religion  of 
Yahweh.  They  would  thus  acquire  the  same  authority 
as  if  they  were  entirely  new,  given  for  the  first  time  by 
the  Divinely  inspired  lawgiver. 

But  besides  these  two  classes  of  laws  and  customs 
there  must  have  been  a  number  which  were  so  bound  up 
with  the  lower  religion  that  they  could  not  be  adopted. 
They  would  either  be  obstructive  of  the  new  ideas,  or  they 
would  be  positively  hostile  to  them ;  for  on  any  supposi- 
tion heathenism  of  various  sorts  was  largely  mingled  with 
the  religion  of  the  Israelite  people  before  their  deliverance, 
and  even  after  it.  To  sift  these  out,  and  to  replace  them 
by  others  more  in  accord  with  the  will  of  Yahweh  as  now 
revealed,  must  have  been  the  chief  work  of  the  lawgiver. 
In  that  more  or  less  protracted  period  before  Israel  came 
to   Sinai,    during   which    Moses    burdened    himself  with 


48o  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

judging  the  people  personally,  he  must  have  been  doing 
this  work.     His  reflections  in  the  wilderness  had  doubtless 
prepared   him   for   it.     In   a   mind  like   his,   the   fruitful 
principles  received   by    the  inspiration    of  the  Almighty 
could  not  be  merely  passively   held.     Like  St.    Paul  in 
his   Arabian   sojourn,    we   must    believe   that    Moses   in 
Midian  would  work  out  the  results  of  these  principles  in 
many  directions ;  and  when  he  led  Israel  forth,  he  must 
have  been  clearly  conscious  of  changes  that  were  indis- 
pensable.    But  it  needed  close  every-day  contact  with  the 
life   of  the   people    to    bring  out  all  the  incompatibilities 
which  he  would  have  to  remove.     Every  day  unexpected 
complications  would  arise  ;  and   the  people  at  any  rate, 
if  Moses  himself  be  supposed  to  be  raised  by  his  inspira- 
tion above   the  needs   of  experience,   would    be  able    to 
receive    the   instruction    they   needed    only   in   concrete 
examples,   here  a  little  and  there   a   little.     When  they 
came  to  ''seek  Yahweh"   in  any  matter  which  perplexed 
them,  Moses  gave  them  Yahweh's  mind  on  the  subject ; 
and  each  decision  tended  to  purify  and  render  innocuous 
to  their  higher  life  some  department  of  pubHc  or  private 
affairs.     Every  day  at  that  early  time  must  have  been  a 
day  of  instruction   how  to   apply  the   principles  of  the 
higher  faith  just  revived.     The  better  minds  among  the 
chiefs  were  thereby  trained  to  an  appreciation  of  the  new 
point  of  view  ;  and  when  Jethro  suggested  that  the  burden 
of  this  work  should  be  divided,  quite  a  sufficient  number 
were  found  prepared  to  carry  it  on.     After  this  it  must 
have  gone  on  with  tenfold  speed,  and  we  may  believe  that 
when  Sinai  was  reached  the  preliminaries  on  the  human 
side  to  the  great  revelation  had  been  thoroughly  elaborated. 
The  Divine  presence  had  been  with  Moses  day  by  day, 
judging,   deciding,   inspiring  in   all   their    individual    con- 
cerns as  well  as  in  their  common  affairs.     But  that  would 
only  bring  out  more  clearly  the  extent  of  the  reformation 


MOSES'    CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  481 

that    remained    to    be    wrought ;    doubtless    too    it    had 
revealed    the  dulness    of  heart  in    regard  to   the   Divine 
which  has  always  characterised  the  mass  of  men.     The 
need  for  a  more  complete  revelation,  a  more  extended  and 
detailed    legislation    on  the    new  basis,   must   have    been 
greatly   felt.     In   the   great  scene    at    Sinai,    a    scene  so 
strange  and  awe-inspiring  that  to  the  latest  days  of  Israel 
the  memory  of  it  thrilled  every  Israelite  heart  and  exalted 
every  Israelite  imagination,  this  need  was  adequately  met. 
In   connection   with  it  Moses  rose  to   new   heights   of 
intimacy  with  the  Divine.     What  he  had  already  done  was 
ratified,  and  in  the  Decalogue  the  great  lines  of  moral  and 
social  life  were  marked  out  for  the  people.     But  the  most 
remarkable  thing  to  us,  in  the  narrative  of  the  circle  of 
events  which  made  the  mountain    of  the   law   for   ever 
memorable,  is  the  sublimity  attributed  to  the  character  of 
Moses.     From  the  day  when  he  smote  the  Egyptian,  at 
every    glimpse    we    have    of    him    we    find    him    always 
advancing   in    power    of    character.      The   shepherd    of 
Midian   is  nobler,  less  self-assertive,  more   overawed  by 
communion  with  God,  than  the  son  of  Pharaoh's  daughter, 
noble   as   he   was.     Again,    the    religious    reformer,    the 
popular  leader,  who  needs  the  very  insistence  of  God  to 
make  him  lead,  who  speaks  for  God  with  such  courageous 
majesty,  who  teaches,  inspires,  and  manages  a  turbulent 
nation   with    such    conspicuous    patience,    self-repression^ 
and  success,  is  greatly  more  impressive  than  the  Moses 
of  Midianite  days.     But  it  is  here,  at  Sinai,  that  his  rank 
among   the    leaders    of  men    is    fixed   for  ever.     To   the 
people  of  that  time  God  was  above  all  things  terrible ;  and 
when  they  came  to  the  mount  and  found  that  "  there  were 
thunders  and  lightnings  and  a  thick  cloud  upon  the  mount^ 
and  the  voice  of  the  trumpet  exceeding  loud,"  they  could 
only    tremble.     Their   very    fear    made  it   impossible  for 
them  to  understand  what  God  desired  to  reveal  concerning 

31 


482  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

Himself.  But  in  Moses  love  had  cast  out  fear.  Even 
to  him,  doubtless,  the  darkness  was  terrible,  because  it 
expressed  only  too  well  the  mystery  which  enwrapped  the 
end^of  the  Divine  purposes  of  which  he  alone  had  seen 
the  beginnings ;  even  his  mind  must  have  been  clouded 
thick  with  doubts  as  to  whither  Yahweh  was  leading  him 
and  his  people ;  yet  he  went  boldly  forth  to  seek  God, 
venturing  all  upon  that  errand. 

In  previous  perplexities  the  narrative  represents 
Moses  as  calling  instantly  upon  Yahweh ;  but  now,  when 
experience  had  taught  him  the  formidable  nature  of  his 
task,  when  difficulties  had  increased  upon  him,  when  his 
perplexities  of  all  kinds  must  have  been  simply  over- 
whelming, he  heard  the  voice  of  Yahweh  calling  him  to 
Himself.  Straightway  he  went  into  solitary  communion 
with  Him  ;  and  when  he  passed  with  satisfied  heart  from 
that  communion,  he  brought  with  him  those  immortal  words 
of  the  Decalogue  which,  amid  all  changes  since,  have  been 
acknowledged  to  be  the  true  foundation  for  moral  and 
spiritual  life.  He  brought  too  a  commission  authorising 
him  to  give  laws  and  judgments  to  his  people  in  accord 
with  what  he  had  heard  and  seen  on  the  mount.  How- 
ever we  are  to  understand  the  details  of  the  narrative 
therefore,  its  meaning  is  that  at  this  time,  and  under  these 
circumstances,  Moses  attained  his  maximum  of  inspiration 
as  a  seer  or  prophet,  and  from  that  time  onward  stood  in 
a  more  intimate  relation  to  God  than  any  of  the  prophets 
and  saints  of  Israel  who  came  after  him.  He  had  found 
God ;  and  from  where  he  stood  with  God  he  saw  the  paths 
of  religious  and  political  progress  plainly  marked  out. 

Henceforth  he  was  competent  to  guide  the  nation  he 
had  made  as  he  had  not  yet  been,  and  with  his  power 
to  help  them  his  eagerness  to  do  so  grew.  Twice  during 
this  great  crisis  of  his  life  the  people  broke  away  into  evil> 
and  national  death  was  threatened.     But  with  passionate 


MOSES'   CHARACTER   AND  DEATH  483 


supplications  for  their  pardon  he  threw  himself  down 
between  God  and  them.  At  precisely  the  moment  when 
his  communion  with  God  was  most  complete,  he  rose  to 
the  loving  recklessness  of  desiring  that  if  they  were  to  be 
destroyed  he  might  perish  with  them.  Strangely  enough, 
though  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  had  this  before  him, 
he  does  not  mention  it.  It  cannot  have  struck  even  him 
as  the  crowning  point  of  Moses'  career,  as  it  does  us. 
Even  in  his  day  the  fitness,  nay,  the  necessity,  of  this  self- 
sacrificing  spirit  as  the  fruit  of  deeper  knowledge  of  God, 
was  not  yet  felt ;  much  less  could  it  have  been  felt  in  the 
days  of  the  earlier  historians.  There  must,  therefore,  be 
reliable  information  here  as  to  what  Moses  actually  did. 
Such  love  as  this  was  not  part  of  the  Israelite  ideal  at  the 
time  of  our  narrative,  and  from  nothing  but  knowledge  of 
the  fact  could  it  have  been  attributed  to  Moses.  We  may 
rank  this  enthusiasm  of  love,  therefore,  as  a  reliable  trait 
in  his  character.  But  if  it  be  so,  how  far  must  he  in  his 
highest  moments  have  transcended  his  contemporaries,  and 
even  the  best  of  his  successors,  in  knowledge  of  the 
inmost  nature  of  God  1  His  thought  was  so  far  above 
them  that  it  remained  fruitless  for  many  centuries. 
Jeremiah's  life  and  death  first  prepared  the  way  for  its 
appreciation,  but  only  in  the  character  of  the  Servant  of 
Yahweh  in  Second  Isaiah  is  it  surpassed.  Now  if  in  this 
deepest  part  of  true  religion  Moses  possessed  such  excep- 
tional spiritual  insight,  it  is  vain  to  attempt  to  show  that 
his  conception  of  God  was  so  low,  and  his  aim  for  man 
so  limited,  as  modern  theorists  suppose.  The  truth  must 
lie  rather  with  those  who,  like  Dr.  A.  B.  Davidson,^  see 
in  him  "  a  profoundly  reverential  ancient  mind  with  ^ 
thoughts  of  God  so  broad  that  mankind  has  added  little 
to  them.     Nothing  in  the  way  of  sublimity  of  view  would 

'  "Moses'  God,"  British  Weekly^  February  2,  1893. 


484  THE    BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

be  incongruous  with  such  a  character,  while  nothing  could 
be  more  grotesque  than  to  shut  it  up  within  the  limits  of 
the  gross  conceptions  of  the  mass  of  the  people.  He  was 
their  guiding  star,  not  their  fellow,  in  all  that  concerned 
God,  and  his  religious  conceptions  were  by  a  whole  heaven 
removed  from  theirs.  The  entire  tragedy  of  his  life  just 
consisted  in  this,  that  he  had  to  strive  with  a  turbulent 
and  gainsaying  people,  had  to  bear  with  them  and  train 
them,  had  to  be  content  with  scarcely  perceptible  advances, 
where  his  strenuous  guidance  and  his  patient  love  should 
have  kindled  them  to  run  in  the  way  of  God's  command- 
ments. But  though  their  progress  was  lamentably  slow, 
he  gave  them  an  impulse  they  were  never  to  lose.  Under 
the  inspiration  of  the  Almighty  he  so  fixed  their  funda- 
mental ideas  about  God  that  they  never  henceforth  could 
get  free  of  his  spiritual  company.  In  all  their  progress 
afterwards  they  felt  the  impress  of  his  mind,  moulding 
and  shaping  them  even  when  they  knew  it  not,  and 
through  them  he  started  in  the  world  that  redemptive 
work  of  God  which  manifested  its  highest  power  in  Jesus 
Christ." 

From  this  point  onward  the  idea  of  Moses  that  Deuter- 
onomy gives  us  is  that  of  a  great  popular  leader,  meeting 
with  extraordinary  calmness  all  the  crises  of  government, 
and  guiding  his  people  with  unwavering  steadfastness. 
Without  power,  except  that  which  his  relation  to  God 
and  the  choice  of  the  people  gave  him,  without  any  official 
title,  he  simply  dominated  the  Israelites  as  long  as  he 
lived.  And  the  secret  of  his  success  is  plainly  told  us 
in  the  narrative.  He  would  not  move  a  single  step 
without  Divine  guidance  (Exod.  xxxiii.  12)  :  '^And  Moses 
said  unto  the  Lord,  See,  Thou  sayest  unto  me.  Bring  up 
this  people :  but  Thou  hast  not  let  me  know  whom  Thou 
wilt  send  with  me."  (Ver.  14)  "And  He  said.  Must  I  go 
in  person  with  thee  and  bring  thee  to  thy  place   of  rest  ? 


MOSES'   CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  485 

And  Moses  said,  If  Thou  dost  not  go  with  us  in  person, 
then  rather  lead  us  not  away  hence."  That  can  only  mean 
that  he  laid  aside  self-will,  that  he  put  away  personal 
sensitiveness,  that  he  had  learned  to  feel  himself  unsafe 
when  vanity  or  self-regard  asserted  themselves  in  his 
decisions,  that  he  sought  continually  that  detachment  of 
view  which  absolute  devotion  to  the  Highest  always  gives. 
It  means  also  that  he  knew  how  dark  and  dull  his  own 
vision  was,  that  clouds  and  darkness  would  always  be 
about  him,  and  that  it  would  be  impossible  for  him  to 
choose  his  path,  unless  he  knew  what  the  Divine  plan  for 
his  people  was.  And  all  that  is  narrated  of  him  afterward 
shows  that  his  prayer  was  granted.  His  patience  under 
trial  has  been  handed  down  to  us  as  a  marvel.  Though 
his  brother  and  sister  rebelled  against  him,  he  won  them 
again  entirely  to  himself  Though  a  faction  among 
the  people  rose  against  his  authority  under  Dathan  and 
Abiram,  his  power  was  not  even  shaken.  Amid  all  the 
perversity  and  childish  fickleness  of  Israel  he  kept  them 
true  to  their  choice  of  the  desert,  "  that  great  and  terrible 
wilderness,"  as  against  Egypt  with  the  flesh-pots.  He 
kept  alive  their  faith  in  the  promise  of  Yahweh  to  give 
them  a  land  flowing  with  milk  and  honey,  and  what  was 
more  and  greater  than  that,  their  faith  in  Him  as  their 
Redeemer.  By  his  intercourse  with  Yahweh  he  was 
upheld  from  falling  away  from  his  own  ideals,  as  so 
many  leaders  of  nations  have  done,  or  from  despairing 
of  them. 

The  complaints  and  perversities  of  the  people  did  how- 
ever force  him  into  sin ;  and  perhaps  we  may  take  it  that 
the  outbreak  of  petulance  when  he  smote  the  rock  was 
only  one  instance  of  some  general  decay  of  character  on  w^'^ 
that  side,  or  perhaps  one  should  rather  say,  of  some  cN'cCoai 
general  falling  away  from  the  self-restraint  which  had 
distinguished  him.     It  seems  strange  that  this  one  failure 


486  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

should  have  been  punished  in  him,  by  exclusion  from  the 
land  he  had  so  steadfastly  believed  in,  the  land  which 
most  of  those  who  actually  entered  it  would  never  have 
seen  but  for  him.  And  it  is  pathetic  to  find  him  among 
that  great  oompany  of  martyrs  for  the  public  good,  those 
who  in  order  to  serve  their  people  have  neglected  their 
own  characters.  Under  the  stress  of  public  wor¥  and  the 
pressure  of  the  stupidity  and  greed  of  those  whom  they 
have  sought  to  guide,  many  leaders  of  men  have  been 
tempted,  and  have  yielded  to  the  temptation,  to  forget 
the  demands  of  their  better  nature.  But  whatever  their 
services  to  the  world,  such  unfaithfulness  does  not  pass 
unpunished.  They  have  to  bear  the  penalty,  whosoever 
they  be;  and  Moses  was  no  more  an  exception  than 
Cromwell  or  Savonarola  was,  to  mention  only  some  of 
the  nobler  examples.  He  had  been  courageous  when 
others  had  faltered.  He  had  been  pre-eminently  just ; 
for  in  founding  the  judicial  system  of  Israel  he  had 
guarded  alike  against  the  tyranny  of  the  great  and  against 
unjust  favour  to  the  small.  He  had  laid  a  firm  hand 
upon  the  education  of  youth,  determined  that  the  best 
inheritance  of  their  people,  the  knowledge  of  the  laws  of 
Yahweh  and  of  His  providences,  should  not  be  lost  to 
them.  He  had  cleared  their  religion  in  principle  of  all 
that  was  unworthy  of  Yahweh,  and  he  had  by  resolute 
valour,  and  by  uncompromising  sternness  to  enemies, 
brought  his  great  task  to  a  successful  issue.  But  the 
reward  of  it  all,  the  entrance  into  the  land  he  had  virtually 
won  for  his  people,  was  denied  to  him.  It  is  one  of  the 
laws  of  the  Divine  government  of  the  world,  that  with 
those  to  whom  God  specially  draws  near  He  is  more 
rigorous  than  with  others.  Amos  clearly  saw  and  pro- 
claimed this  principle  (Amos  iii.  2).  ''  Hear  this  word 
that  Yahweh  hath  spoken  against  you,  children  of  Israel," 
he  says ;  "You  only  have  I  known  of  all  the  families  of  the 


MOSES'   CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  487 

earth  :  therefore  I  will  visit  upon  you  all  3^our  iniquities." 
The  pathetic  picture  of  the  aged  lawgiver,  judge,  and 
prophet,  beseeching  God  in  vain  that  he  might  share  in 
the  joy  which  was  freely  bestowed  upon  so  many  less 
known  and  less  worthy  than  he,  pushes  home  that  strenu- 
ous teaching.  For  his  sin  he  died  with  his  last  earnest 
wish  unfulfilled,  and  it  was  sadly  longing  eyes  that  death's 
finger  touched.  We  remember  also  that,  so  far  as  we  can 
judge,  he  had  no  certain  hope  of  a  future  life  other  than  the 
shadowy  existence  of  Hades.  ''  Though  he  slay  me  yet 
will  I  trust  him "  had  a  much  more  tragic  meaning  for 
Old  Testament  saints  than  it  can  ever  have  for  us,  for 
whom  Christ  has  brought  life  and  immortality  to  fight. 
Yet,  with  a  so  much  heavier  burden,  and  with  so  much 
less  of  gracious  support,  they  played  their  high  part. 
That  solitary  figure  on  the  mountain-top,  about  to  die 
with  the  fulfilment  of  his  passionate  last  wish  denied  him 
by  his  God,  must  shame  us  into  silence  when  we  fret 
because  our  hopes  have  perished.  All  those  nations 
which  have  had  that  figure  on  their  horizon  have  been 
permanently  enriched  in  nature  by  it.  In  a  thousand 
ways  it  has  shot  forth  instructions ;  but,  above  all,  it  has 
made  men  worthy  in  their  own  eyes ;  for  it  has  been  a 
continuous  reminder  that  God  can  and  ought  to  be  served 
unfalteringly,  even  when  the  reward  we  wish  is  denied  us, 
and  when  every  other  consolation  is  dim. 

But  the  question  may  now  arise.  Is  not  this  character 
of  Moses  which  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  partly  had 
before  him  and  partly  helped  to  elaborate,  too  exalted  to 
be  reliable  ?  Can  we  suppose  that  a  man  in  Moses'  day 
and  circumstances  could  actually  have  entertained  such 
thoughts,  and  have  possessed  such  a  character  as  we  have 
been  depicting  ?  In  essentials  it  would  appear  to  be 
quite  possible.  Putting  aside  all  distracting  questions 
about  details,  and  remembering  that  it  is  a  mere  super- 


488  THE  BOOK   OF  DEUTERONOMY 

stition  to  suppose  that  the  wants  and  appliances  of 
civilisation  are  necessary  to  loftiness  of  character  and 
depth  of  thought,  where  is  there  anything  in  the  situation 
of  Moses  which  should  make  this  view  of  him  incredible  ? 
No  doubt  there  was  a  rudeness  in  his  surroundings  which 
must  necessarily  have  affected  his  nature ;  and  the  forms  of 
his  thinl^ng  in  that  early,  though  by  no  means  primitive, 
time  must  have  differed  greatly  from  ours.  Moreover, 
as  an  instrument  for  scientific  inquiry  and  for  the 
verification  of  facts,  the  human  mind  must  have  been 
greatly  less  effective  then  than  it  is  to-day.  But  none 
of  these  things  have  much  influence  upon  a  man's  capacity 
to  receive  a  new  and  inspiring  revelation  as  to  God. 
Otherwise  no  child  could  be  a  Christian.  As  regards  the 
rudeness  of  his  surroundings,  we  must  not  consciously  or 
unconsciously  degrade  him  to  the  level  of  a  modern 
Bedouin.  Among  the  host  he  led,  some  doubtless  were 
at  that  level ;  but  the  bulk  of  Israel  must  have  been  above 
it ;  and  Moses  himself,  from  his  circumstances  and  his 
natural  endowment,  must  have  stood  side  by  side  with  the 
most  cultured  men  of  his  time.  Whatever  ignorance  or 
error  in  science  he  may  have  been  capable  of,  and  however 
rude,  according  to  our  ideas,  his  manner  of  life,  there  was 
nothing  in  these  to  shut  him  out  from  spiritual  truth. 
That  which  Prof.  Henry  Morley  has  finally  said  of  Dante ^ 
must  have  been  true,  mutatis  mutandis^  of  a  man  like  Moses. 
"  Dante's  knowledge  is  the  knowledge  of  his  time,"  but 
**  if  spiritual  truth  only  came  from  right  and  perfect 
knowledge,  this  would  have  been  a  world  of  dead  souls 
from  the  first  to  now,  for  future  centuries  in  looking  back 
at  us  will  wonder  at  the  little  faulty  knowledge  that  we 
think  so  much.  But  let  the  known  be  what  it  may,  the 
true  soul  rises  from  it  to  a  sense  of  the  Divine  mysteries 

•  Qonvito  of  Danie,  Morley 's  Universal  Library,  Introd\jction,  pp.  6ff, 


MOSES'   CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  489 

of  wisdom  and  love.     Dante's  knowledge  may  be  full  of 
ignorance,  and  so  is  ours.     But  he  fills  it  as  he  can  with 
the  spirit  of  God."     In  the  East  this  is  even  more  con- 
spicuously  true,    even   to   this  day.     What   an    Israelite 
under  similar  conditions  might  be  is  seen  in  the  prophet 
Amos.     His   external   condition  was    of  the   poorest— a 
gatherer  of  sycamore  fruit  must  have  been  poor  even  for 
the  East— yet  he  knew  accurately  the  history,  not  only  of 
his  own   people,    but    of  the    surrounding   nations,    and 
brooded  on  the  purpose  of  God  in   regard  to  his   own 
people   and  the  world,  till  he  became  a  fit  recipient  ot 
prophetic  inspirations.     But  indeed  the  whole  history  of 
Christianity  is  a  demonstration  of  this  truth.     From  the 
first  days,  when  ''  not  many  mighty,  not  many  noble  were 
being  called,"  when  it  was  specially  the  message  to  hsten- 
ing   slaves,   the  religion  of  Christ   has   had  its  greatest 
triumphs  among  the  -  poor  of  the  world,  rich  in  faith, 
but  in  nothing  else.     These  have  not  only  believed  it,  but 
they    have   lived   it,   and   amid  the    meanest   and   rudest 
surroundings,  with  the  most  Umited  outlook,  have  built 
up  characters  often  of  even  resplendent  virtue.     Whatever 
primitiveness  we  may  fairly  ascribe,  therefore,  to  the  hie 
and  surroundings  of  Moses,  that  is  no  reason  why  we 
should  think  it  incredible  that  he  had  received  lofty  spiritual 
truth  from  God.     If  he  did  such  things  for  Israel  as  we 
have  seen,  if,   as  almost  all  admit,  he  actually  made   a 
nation,  and  planted  the  seeds  of  a  religion  of  which  Chris- 
tianity is    the  natural  complement  and  crown,   then  the 
view  that  he  had  a  greatly  higher  idea  of  God  than  those 
about   him  is   not   only  credible    but  necessary.     If  his 
teaching  concerning  Yahweh  had  amounted  only  to  this 
that  He  was  the  only  God   Israel  was  to  worship,  and 
that   they  were   to   be  solely  His  people,    then  on  such 
a  basis  nothing  more  than  the  ordinary  heathen  civilisa- 
tions of  the  Semitic  people  could  have  been  built,     but 


490  THE  BOOK  OF  DEUTERONOMY 

if  he  had  the  thought  of  God  which  is  embodied  in  the 
Decalogue,  that  could  bring  with  it  everything  in  the 
character  of  Moses  that  see«is  too  high  for  those  early 
days.  The  knowledge  of  God  as  a  spiritual  and  moral 
being  could  not  fail  to  moralise  and  spiritualise  the  man. 
The  lofty  conception  of  human  duty,  the  submission  to 
the  will  of  God,  the  passionate  love  for  his  nation  which 
made  personal  loss  nothing  to  Moses,  may  well  have  been 
evoked  by  the  great  truth  which  formed  his  prophetic 
revelation. 

But  the  narrative  itself,  considered  merely  as  a  history, 
is  of  such  a  nature  as  to  give  confidence  that  it  rests  upon 
some  record  of  an  actual  life.  Ideal  sketches  of  great 
men  (setting  aside  the  products  of  modern  Active  art)  are 
much  more  uniform  and  superficially  coherent  than  this 
character  of  Moses.  The  purpose  of  the  writer  either  to 
exalt  or  to  decry  carries  all  before  it,  and  we  get  from 
such  a  source  pictures  of  character  so  consistent  that  they 
cannot  possibly  be  true.  Here,  however,  we  have  nothing 
of  that  kind.  Rashnesses  and  weaknesses  are  narrated, 
and  even  Moses'  good  qualities  are  manifested  in  unex- 
pected ways  in  response  to  unexpected  evils  in  the  people. 
The  mere  fact,  also,  that  his  grave  was  unknown  is  indi- 
cative of  truth.  Though  it  would  be  absurd  to  say  that 
wherever  we  have  the  graves  of  great  men  pointed  out, 
there  we  have  a  mythical  story,  it  is  nevertheless  true 
that  in  the  case  of  every  name  or  character  which  has 
come  largely  under  the  influence  of  the  myth-making 
spirit,  the  grave  has  been  made  much  of  The  Arabian 
imagination  here  seems  to  be  typical  of  the  Semitic 
imagination ;  and  in  all  Moslem  lands  the  graves  of  the 
prophets  and  saints  of  the  Old  Testament  are  pointed  out 
with  great  reverence,  even,  or  perhaps  we  should  say 
especially,  if  they  be  eighty  feet  long.  Though  a  well- 
authenticated  tomb  of  Moses,  therefore,  would  have  been 


MOSES    CHARACTER  AND  DEATH  491 

a  proof  of  his  real  existence  and  life  among  men,  the 
absence  of  any  is  a  stronger  proof  of  the  sobriety  and 
truth  of  the  narrative.  That  with  the  goal  in  sight,  and 
with  his  great  work  about  to  come  to  fruition,  he  should 
have  turned  away  into  the  solitude  of  the  mountains  to 
die,  is  so  very  unlikely  to  occur  to  the  mind  of  the  writer 
of  an  ideal  life  of  an  ideal  leader,  that  only  some  tradition 
of  this  as  a  fact  can  account  for  it.  The  unexpectedness 
of  such  an  end  to  a  hero's  career  is  the  strongest  evidence 
of  its  truth. 

The  result  of  all  the  indications  is  that  the  story  of 
Moses,  as  the  author  of  Deuteronomy  knew  it,  rests  upon 
authentic  information  handed  down  somehow,  probably 
in  written  documents,  from  the  earliest  time.  Apart  from 
the  question  of  inspiration,  therefore,  we  may  rest  upon 
it  as  reliable  in  all  essentials.  Only  in  him,  and  the 
revelation  he  received,  have  we  an  adequate  cause  for 
the  great  upheaval  of  religious  feeling  which  shaped  and 
characterised  all  the  after-history  of  Israel. 


Date  Due 


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